Rule of the Bone (18 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What?

Strong.

About what?

About getting divorced from him. After she found out he was seeing other women. It was all over town, she said.

You
wanted
her to divorce him?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd say the night that I walked out of Au Sable forever in the rain was one of the weirdest nights of my life except that nothing happened. Plus later I went through some even weirder nights and of course I'd already experienced quite a few by then that not many normal people go through, due to drugs and the bikers and some of the stuff maybe that me and Russ'd done together like at the Ridgeways' summerhouse in Keene. But even though nothing was happening it was only on the outside because inside I was like tripping only I wasn't high or anything.

After a while I didn't think about my real father and me anymore because there wasn't enough real information to feed my thoughts so to speak. It was like my brain ran out of things to say to me. I was walking along 9N on the shoulder of the road in the darkness with the rain pouring down on me stepping steadily straight ahead like I was marching to the edge of the planet so I could drop right off it into cold black empty space. My mind was empty and my body was this machine that walked. Every once in a while a car or a truck would go by and catch me in the lights and slow down to check me out and a couple of times drivers stopped and rolled down the window and said did I want a ride but I kept on moving so they probably figured I was just a stoned freaked-out kid or a mass murderer or something and went on their way.

I actually kind of was a mass murderer. Boy slays family and self. I'd started having these incredibly realistic visions of firing my niner at my stepfather, shooting him in the right temple from about six inches away while I stood with my foot on his neck and him lying on the floor begging me not to. It was pretty vivid, with blood and brains splashing over my foot and all.

And then my mom comes into the room, it's my old bedroom at home and she sees what's happened to Ken and me with the gun and blood spattered all over my pantsleg and sandal from where I had placed it on his neck and my hands from holding the gun so close to his head when I fired, and she takes off down the hall and I go after her and catch her as she gets to the door only it's locked and she can't get it open in time so she goes, No, Chappie,
don't
!

I do though. I give her one straight in the heart. It was like in a video game only real.

I looked out the livingroom window and there was Grandma coming up the walk so I opened the door for her and she came inside and saw my mom lying there with blood all over her chest and her eyes rolled back and her mouth open with blood bubbling out and Grandma says,
What's
going
on?
and that's when I blast her too. In the heart, same as my mom.

Afterwards I walked around the house for a while calling Willie and finally I remembered that he was dead too and it was Ken who ran over him and then I realized that if ol' Willie was still alive maybe none of this would've happened. It's amazing but all I needed was that little black and white cat who really liked me and I probably wouldn't have slain my family. He only weighed nine or ten pounds, about like a bag of sugar and he couldn't talk or anything but it was like there was the concentration of a person inside his furry head who truly liked me and was always sincerely glad to see me when I came home and slept on my lap whenever I stayed up late alone watching MTV and purred with contentment like I made him feel safe in a dangerous world.

I remembered the time I got Ken's .22 rifle with the scope out of the case that was stashed in his and my mom's bedroom closet and aimed it at Willie and pulled the trigger but the safety was on and it didn't fire so I used the gun to shoot up Ken's and my mom's bed instead. I felt incredibly guilty then for almost killing Willie. Sometimes I guess you do a bad thing in order not to do a worse thing that you can't stop yourself from doing. Boy slays cat and self they would've said if that day Ken's .22 hadn't had the safety on. Ken and Mom and Grandma would've been okay and even would've gone to the funeral and after that normal life would've resumed for them.

Lucky for Willie I guess, even though he bought it later. But unlucky for them because now I'd ended up doing the worst thing instead of only the bad thing. It was like being inside a snuff video on the VCR and watching it at the same time with a remote in my hand and I could play the same three scenes over and over, noticing new details each time, pressing Rewind after I whacked Grandma—she gets up and goes backwards out the door and down the steps to the street and Mom stands up and yanks on the locked door and then comes toward me down the hall with her back facing me like we're playing blindman's buff when suddenly she turns and sees Ken on the floor his head all bloody and I stand up and put the gun into my backpack and by this time Ken is slipping back out the bedroom door—and then pressing Play and now I notice when he comes sneaking into my bedroom that Ken's wearing only his bikini underpants and he's got a boner and that glazed boozy look in his eyes that makes me feel like bread dough, and my mom's first reaction actually is to be pissed off at me for making such a mess and firing off a gun inside the house instead of for what in reality I've gone and done with it, killed her husband, and my grandma's first thought I can tell from her face when she sees that my mom's lying dead on the floor is that maybe she'll get something out of it for herself, the house even.

Hours passed, it was probably like three in the morning and there weren't any more cars on the road but it kept raining and my body kept walking while the rest of me was trapped inside the family massacre video examining and thinking about every gross detail. Over by Keeseville where the road crosses the Ausable River I got halfway out on the bridge when I noticed the wind was blowing and suddenly it was like the VCR had jammed with everybody but me dead in the house and it wouldn't rewind or go forward. It's stuck on the scene at the end where I go around the house looking for ol' Willie. Here, Willie, c'mon out, Willie.

For the first time since leaving my grandma's apartment I stopped walking. I looked over the railing and down about three hundred feet into the chasm and the rocks and the rushing water below which I could hear in spite of the rain beating down and the wind. It was too dark to see the river or the rocks down there and I thought now was the time and place if he was going to do it right for the boy to slay self. No muss, no fuss. Behind him nothing but waste and scenes of carnage. Ahead more of the same.

I took off my backpack and set it down on the walkway and climbed up onto the flat top of a concrete post that the iron railing was attached to and with my hands out at my sides stood there for a while listening to the water way below churning over the rocks and felt the cold wind push against my soaked tee shirt and cutoffs and looked up into the black sky and let the rain fall straight onto my face. I was shivering from the cold and the wet and except for that I couldn't tell anymore what was real from what was only in my head.

The concrete post was slippery under my feet though. And when I noticed that I realized I didn't want to fall off the bridge into the chasm and bust myself up on the rocks by accident. I figured I'd better get down and think about this some more. I don't know why but it seemed that the worst thing I could do now was accidentally kill myself. I wanted to do it strictly on purpose. Not some dumb slipup.

Just then I saw the lights of a car approaching from the direction of Willsboro still a long ways off and I started to turn and get down so I could get off of the bridge before the car got close enough to see me because at this hour it was probably a state cop. But when I turned, my right foot slid off the edge of the post and my left followed and for a second I was floating in the air and then I flung out both hands and grabbed at the darkness and found the iron bars of the bridge railing. I clamped on and hung there with my whole body dangling below the bridge while the steady gush of the rain above and the overflowing river far below filled my brain like that classical music from the Burlington station I heard once on a car radio when I was hitching home to Au Sable from the mall. The music was real mellow and relaxing and all, with violins and clarinets and hundreds of other instruments playing this smooth powerful song that rose like in spirals and fell and swirled around and rose again like it could do that forever or at least for a very long time.

I was starting to think the music was strong enough to lift me up and carry me off like on a beautiful soft cloud if I let go of the iron railings which I clung to like they were the bars of a jail cell and my hands were pretty cold by then and I probably couldn't hold on for more than a few seconds longer anyhow, when the car I'd seen before got to the bridge and splashed across and cast its lights over everything and made me see clearly where I was, dangling a hundred yards above a killer river in a wicked rainstorm. After the car passed on it was like it'd left its lights behind because I could still see exactly what I'd seen in that split second and it freaked me so I pulled myself up and got one foot onto the bridge and then the other and managed to clamber back over the rail to safety.

I was breathing real hard. My teeth were chattering and I was soaked through and my heart and liver felt like they were frozen solid. I went over to my backpack which was all I owned in the world, my rain-soaked worldly effects it would have been if they'd found it there in the morning and my body all smashed up on the rocks below. Opening it I reached in and pulled out the pistol I'd used or thought I'd used and still kneeling flipped it over my shoulder. I watched it sail into the air turning like a tiny dead animal and then disappear into the darkness and down into the chasm. Then I stood up and put the backpack on again and started walking toward Plattsburgh. That was the closest I ever came to committing mass murder and suicide and until now I've never told anyone.

By the time I got to the field behind the warehouses and spotted the schoolbus out there in the middle it was dawn and the rain had finally stopped. The sky was a shiny gray color like it had wet paint on it with these wispy white cloud-tails floating underneath here and there. I crossed through the chain-link fence and the tall wet grasses and ragweed and goldenrod in the field slapped against my bare legs and pasted their seeds to my skin as I made my way toward what I guess I now thought of as home. Although the truth is I wasn't thinking much of anything then, I was dizzy and shivering and probably had a hundred and ten fever and a couple of times during my nightlong hike I'd been really sorry I'd given the sweater I'd taken from Mr. Ridgeway to Sister Rose at the bus station. It was only yesterday morning but back then I'd figured she was going to places unknown and I was going home to where I had parents who'd buy me clothes of my own so I could afford to be generous.

I don't really remember arriving at the schoolbus, only crossing the field and the weeds and the seeds and hundreds of daisies and black-eyed susans and the bus getting bigger and bigger until it was the only thing I could see, this big banged-up yellow schoolbus with huge green leafy plants instead of kids looking out of the mostly broken windows, and then I was knocking at the door like I was a kid who wanted to be picked up for school and that's all I remember. It was like once I'd gotten there I could finally let go the way I'd wanted to let go when I was hanging off the bridge because the next thing I remember is waking up inside the bus on a mattress with a blanket around me and a dry tee shirt on that's too big like a nightshirt.

I felt like a newborn baby. Sunlight was splashing through the windows and I was warm and dry and there was music playing, reggae music, this light bouncy sweet tune with the words, Hey, Mister Yesterday, what are you doing from today? It was so different from the music that I'd heard on the bridge which I now realized was evil and weird and probably sent from Satan like you're supposed to hear when you play heavy metal backwards that I became at that moment like a complete convert to reggae. It filled my head with light and for the first time I could remember I was happy to be alive.

I ached all over though, like my body was a box of rocks and I could barely turn my head to see where the music was coming from, somewhere above and behind me when suddenly there was I-Man dancing barefoot and wearing his floppy shorts and flipping his head and switching his dreads to the beat with this big spliff in his mouth which smelled like freshly turned earth and sunbeams. He kept on shuffling in this excellent reggae dance around my bed smiling down and nodding his head like he was glad to see me awake but didn't want to say anything to interrupt the music, just bopping by to check on Mister Yesterday and then moving on down toward the rear of the bus and returning a few seconds later with a steaming bowl in his hand, still dancing and puffing on his spliff until finally the song ended and he said how I was coming forward now and mus' drink dis herb fe return to de structure of life an' de fullness dereof.

Which I did. It took a while and sometimes I got the chills again and then I'd sweat for hours especially at night and I was so weak I could barely sit up and had to piss in a jar and so on. But I-Man knew all these old African and Rastafarian cures from herbs and other plants he could find in the field and out among the shady woods behind Sun Foods and downtown in the park by the lake that he'd go out for at night and bring back and mash up and boil into like a tea that he actually spoonfed to me for quite a few days, and every morning I woke up feeling a little bit better until pretty soon we were having regular conversations like before. I-Man still had a lot of Rasta wisdom to impart and I still had a lot to learn about life in general and about the spirit of truth and goodness, as I'd discovered from trying to go back home again so I just tried to relax and listen and watch.

The reggae tunes were from some tapes and a box, a cool Sony probably stolen that had been given to I-Man by a local kid he called Jah Mood but I knew he was only Randy Moody who was heavy into reggae and dope and had grown these matted white-kid imitation dreadlocks that he thought were cool and they sort of were if you didn't know about the real thing. Randy though was too dumb to know the difference between black people and white people or too racist to admit there was a difference and he was stuck forever being a white kid from Plattsburgh.