Rumble Fish (3 page)

“I thought you were gone for good,” I said.

He shrugged. “So did I.”

Steve picked up my jacket, where I'd thrown it on the ground. “Rusty-James, you better go to the hospital.”

I looked down at my hand, where it was clutching my side. I saw Smokey Bennet watching me.

“For this?” I said scornfully. “This ain't nothin'.”

“But maybe you better go home,” the Motorcycle Boy said.

I nodded. I threw an arm across Steve's shoulders. “I knew you was gonna show up.”

He knew I would have fallen down if I wasn't leaning on him, but he didn't show it. He was a good kid, Steve, even if he did read too much.

“I had to sneak out,” Steve said. “They'd kill me if they knew. Boy, I thought Biff was gonna kill you.”

“Not me. It was Biff who was gonna get killed.”

I could feel the Motorcycle Boy laughing. But then, I never expected to fool him. I tried not to lean on Steve too much. Smokey walked along with us until we came to his block. I guess I had convinced him I wasn't going to drop dead.

“Where ya been?” I asked the Motorcycle Boy. He'd been gone for two weeks. He had stolen a cycle and left. Everybody called him the Motorcycle Boy because he was crazy about Motorcycles. It was like a title or something. I was probably one of the few people on the block who knew what his real name was. He had this bad habit of borrowing cycles and going for rides without telling the owner. But that was just one of the things he could get away with. He could get away with anything. You'd think he'd have a cycle of his own by now, but he never had and never would. It seemed like he didn't want to own anything.

“California,” he said.

“No kiddin'?” I was amazed. “The ocean and everything? How was it?”

“Kid,” he said to me, “I never got past the river.”

I didn't understand what he meant. I spent a lot of time trying to understand what he meant. It was like the time, years ago, when our gang, the Packers, was having a big rumble with the gang next door. The Motorcycle Boy—he was president—said, “Okay, let's get it straight what we're fighting for.”

And everybody was all set to kill or be killed, raring to go, and some cat—I forget his name, he's in prison now—said, “We're fighting to own this street.”

And the Motorcycle Boy said, “Bull. We're fighting for fun.”

He always saw things different from everybody else. It would help me a lot if I could understand what he meant.

We climbed up the wooden stairs that went up the outside of the dry cleaners to our apartment. Steve eased me onto the platform railing. I hung over the railing and said, “I ain't got my key,” so the Motorcycle Boy jimmied the lock and we went on in.

“You better lay down,” he said. I laid down on the cot. We had a mattress and a cot to lay down on. It didn't matter which.

“Boy, are you bleeding!” Steve said.

I sat up and pulled off my sweatshirt. It was soggy with blood. I threw it over into the corner with the other dirty clothes and inspected my wound. I was gashed down the side. It was deep over my ribs; I could see white bone gleaming through. It was a bad cut.

“Where's the old man?” asked the Motorcycle Boy. He was going through the bottles in the sink. He found one with some wine still in it.

“Take a swallow,” he told me. I knew what was coming. I wasn't looking forward to it, but I wasn't scared either. Pain don't scare me much.

“Lay down and hang on.”

“The old man ain't home yet,” I said, laying down on my good side and grabbing hold of the head of the cot.

The Motorcycle Boy poured the rest of the wine over the cut. It hurt like hell. I held my breath and counted and counted and counted until I was sure I could open my mouth without yelling.

Poor Steve was white. “God, that must hurt,” he whispered.

“Ain't all that bad,” I said, but my voice came out hoarse and funny.

“He oughta go to a doctor,” Steve said. The Motorcycle Boy sat down against the wall. He had an expressionless face. He stared at Steve till the poor kid wiggled. The Motorcycle Boy wasn't seeing him, though. He saw things other people couldn't see, and laughed when nothing was funny. He had strange eyes—they made me think of a two-way mirror. Like you could feel somebody on the other side watching you, but the only reflection you saw was your own.

“He's been hurt worse than this,” said the Motorcycle Boy. That was the truth. I got cut bad two or three years before.

“But it could get infected,” Steve said.

“And they'd have to cut my side off,” I added. I shouldn't have teased him. He was only trying to help.

The Motorcycle Boy just sat and stared and stayed quiet.

“He looks different,” Steve said to me. Sometimes the Motorcycle Boy went stone deaf—he'd had a lot of concussions in motorcycle wrecks.

I looked at him, trying to figure out what was different. He didn't seem to see either one of us watching him.

“The tan,” Steve said.

“Yeah, well, I guess you get tan in California,” I said. I couldn't picture the Motorcycle Boy in California, by the ocean. He liked rivers, not oceans.

“Did you know I got expelled from school?” the Motorcycle Boy said out of the clear blue sky.

“How come?” I started to sit up, and changed my mind. They were always threatening to expel me. They'd suspended me for carrying that knife. But the Motorcycle Boy never gave them any trouble. I talked to a guy in one of his classes, once. He said the Motorcycle Boy just sat there and never gave them any trouble, except that a couple of the teachers couldn't stand for him to stare at them.

“How come you got expelled?” I asked.

“Perfect tests.”

You could always feel the laughter around him, just under the surface, but this time it came to the top and he grinned. It was a flash, like lightning, far off.

“I handed in perfect semester tests.” He shook his head. “Man, I can understand that. A tough district school like that, they got enough to put up with.”

I was surprised. I don't surprise easy. “But that ain't fair,” I said finally.

“When the hell did you start expecting anything to be fair?” he asked. He didn't sound bitter, only a little bit curious.

“Be back in a while,” he said, getting to his feet.

“I forgot he was still in school,” Steve said after he left. “He looks so old, I forget he's just seventeen.”

“That's pretty old.”

“Yeah, but he looks really old, like twenty-one or something.”

I didn't say anything. I got to thinking—when the Motorcycle Boy was fourteen, that had seemed old. When he was fourteen, like me, he could buy beer. They quit asking for his ID at fourteen. He was president of the Packers then, too. Older guys, eighteen years old, would do anything he said. I thought it would be the same way for me. I thought I would be really big-time, junior high and fourteen. I thought it would be really neat, being that old—but whenever I got to where he had been, nothing was changed except he'd gone further on. It should of been the same way for me.

“Steve,” I said, “bring me the old man's shavin' mirror. It's over there by the sink.”

When he handed it to me I studied the way I looked.

“We look just like each other,” I said.

“Who?”

“Me an' the Motorcycle Boy.”

“Naw.”

“Yeah, we do.”

We had the same color of hair, an odd shade of dark red, like black-cherry pop. I've never seen anybody else with hair that color. Our eyes were the same, the color of a Hershey bar. He was six foot one, but I was getting there.

“Well, what's the difference?” I said finally. I knew there was a difference. People looked at him, and stopped, and looked again. He looked like a panther or something. Me, I just looked like a tough kid, too big for my age.

“Well,” Steve said—I liked that kid, he'd think about things—“the Motorcycle Boy … I don't know. You can never tell what he's thinking. But you can tell exactly what
you're
thinking.”

“No kiddin'?” I said, looking in the mirror. It had to be something more than that.

“Rusty-James,” Steve said, “I gotta go home. If they find out I'm gone, I'm gonna get killed, man. Killed.”

“Aw, stick around awhile.” I was scared he would go. I can't stand being by myself. That is the only thing I am honest-to-God scared of. If nobody was at home, I would stay up all night, out on the streets where there was some people. I didn't mind being cut up. I just couldn't stay there by myself and I wasn't too sure I could walk.

Steve shifted around, uneasy-like. He was one of the few people who knew about that hang-up. I don't go around telling people.

“Just for a little bit,” I told him. “The old man oughta be back pretty soon.”

“Okay,” he said finally. He sat down where the Motorcycle Boy had been sitting. After a while I was kind of dozing off and on. It seemed like I went through the whole fight again in slow motion. I knew I was sort of asleep, but I couldn't stop dreaming.

“I never thought he'd go clear to the ocean,” I said to Steve. But Steve wasn't there. The Motorcycle Boy was there, reading a book. He always read books. I'd thought when I got older it'd be easy for me to read books, too, but I knew by now it never would.

It was different when the Motorcycle Boy read books, different from Steve. I don't know why.

The old man was home, snoring away on the mattress. I wondered who'd gotten home first. I couldn't tell what time it was. The lights were still on. I can't tell what time it is when I sleep with the lights on.

“I thought you was gone for good,” I said to him.

“Not me.” He didn't look up from his page, and for a second I thought I was still dreaming. “I get homesick.”

I made a list in my head of people I liked. I do that a lot. It makes me feel good to think of people I like—not so alone. I wondered if I loved anybody. Patty, for sure. The Motorcycle Boy. My father, sort of. Steve, sort of. Then I thought of people I thought I could really count on, and couldn't come up with anybody, but it wasn't as depressing as it sounds.

I was so glad the Motorcycle Boy came home. He was the coolest person in the whole world. Even if he hadn't been my brother he would have been the coolest person in the whole world.

And I was going to be just like him.

I went to school the next day. I wasn't feeling too hot and I was bleeding off and on, but I usually go to school if I can. I see all my friends at school.

I got there late and had to go get a late pass and ended up missing math. So I didn't know Steve was absent till lunch and he didn't show up. I asked around about him—Jeannie Martin told me he didn't come to school because his mother had a stroke or something. I worried about that awhile. I hoped it wasn't him sneaking out of the house that give her the stroke. His parents were kind of weird. They never let him do anything.

Jeannie Martin wasn't too thrilled to talk to me. She liked Steve. Poor kid. He wouldn't believe that her tipping his chair over in English meant she liked him. He was still funny about girls. And him fourteen, too! Anyway, she liked him and didn't like me because she thought I'd turn him into a hood. Fat chance. I'd known him since I don't remember when, and nobody thought he was a hood. Try and tell her that.

So I went to the basement and played poker with B.J. and Smokey and lost fifty cents.

“You guys must cheat,” I told them. “I can't have rotten luck all the time.”

B.J. grinned at me and said, “Naw, you're just a lousy poker player, Rusty-James.”

“I ain't either.”

“Yeah, you are. Every time you get a good hand, we can tell it. Every time you get a bad hand, we can tell. You ain't gonna earn your livin' gamblin', man.”

“Don't give me that. Them cards was marked.” I knew they weren't, but I didn't believe that garbage B.J. was giving me. He just wanted to crow about winning.

In gym I just stood around watching basketball practice. I wasn't about to do any basketball. Coach Ryan finally asked me why, and I said I didn't feel like it. I thought I could leave it at that. Coach Ryan was all the time trying to be friends with me. He let me get away with murder. It was like he'd be a big shot, being friends with me, like he owned a vicious dog or something.

“Rusty-James,” he said, after looking around, making sure nobody could hear us. “Want to earn a quick five bucks?”

I just looked at him. You never know.

“Price has been giving me a lot of trouble these days.”

“Yeah,” I said. Don Price was a smart alec. Real mouthy. I'm mouthy, too, but I don't mean nothing by it. He was mouthy just to get on people's nerves. A real obnoxious kid.

“I'll give you five bucks to beat him up.”

Well, that would have been simple enough. I knew where the guy lived, I could jump him some afternoon. With my rep nobody'd think to ask why. He was just the kind of jerk I liked beating up.

About six months before, a guy had offered the Motorcycle Boy four hundred dollars to kill somebody. That is the truth. He didn't take it. Said whenever he killed somebody it wouldn't be for money.

“I can't fight for a while,” I said. I jerked up my gym shirt to show him why.

“Hey, man!” There he was, thirty years old, saying “Hey, man.” He wasn't brought up talking like that, either.

“You been to the nurse?”

“Nope.” I pulled my shirt back down. “Ain't gonna, either.”

“Well,” he said slowly, “let me know when you're healed up.”

“Sure thing,” I said, and went back to watching practice. He must have thought I needed money real bad.

English was my last class. I liked it because our teacher thought we were so stupid that all she had to do was read us stories. That was all right with me. By the end of the day I was ready to sit still awhile anyway. She didn't have any way of knowing if we were listening. Sometimes she'd give us a test at the end of class, but I could always copy off somebody, if anybody knew the answers.

I'm always in dumb classes. In grade school they start separating dumb people from smart people and it only takes you a couple of years to figure out which one you are. I guess it's easier on the teachers that way, but I think I might like to get in a class with some different people sometimes instead of the same old dummies every year.

Steve was in my math class this year only because he had a choice of new math or business math and he took business math. All the other smart people took new math, but he wasn't crazy about numbers. I'd been going to the same school with him since kindergarten and this was the first year we were in a class together. I wondered if he got tired of seeing the same old smart people every year.

I sat there and didn't listen and thought maybe I'd go by and see Patty after school. If I hadn't lost that fifty cents at lunchtime I could have bribed her brothers to go to the park or something.

Smokey must have been cheating. I ain't that bad a player.

When I went by her house, though, her mother's car was still there. Maybe it was her day off. I never could keep them straight. Her mother wasn't crazy about me. I think the brothers sometimes squealed on Patty. Man, I wanted to knock their blocks off.

So I went to Benny's and shot a game of pool by myself. There were other people there, but nobody playing pool. Everybody who came in wanted to see my knife cut. They thought it was cool.

Steve came by after an hour. I could tell he wasn't in a mood to hang around Benny's. He just wanted some company, so I left with him.

“How's your old lady?” I asked him after we'd walked a couple of blocks.

“Real sick.” He had a funny white look on his face. “She's in the hospital.”

“It wasn't you sneakin' out that did it?”

He looked at me like I was off my rocker. Then he remembered and said, “No, it wasn't that.”

He didn't say anything else, so I started telling him how Coach Ryan had asked me to beat up a guy. Only I said he offered me fifty dollars to do it, and said I was really thinking about it. But even that didn't seem to shake him out of it. He just said, “Yeah?” like he was somewhere else.

I was needing some money. My old man, he got a regular check from the government. He had to go down and sign for it, but it wasn't very much and sometimes he'd forget to give me some of it before he drank it up. I did a lot of scrounging around. Once in a while I'd borrow money from the Motorcycle Boy, but I had to be really careful and pay it back. I don't know why I was so careful about that. One time he gave me a hundred-dollar bill because he said he didn't want it. I don't know where he got it. Since he didn't want it I didn't worry about paying that back. Most of the time I paid him back, though.

So when I spotted a set of real cool simulated mags on a late-model Chevy, I saw a quick way to make twenty bucks. Twenty dollars would last me a good long while.

The car was sitting there in front of an apartment house, but nobody was around. I had three of the hubcaps off and was working on the fourth one when Steve said, “What are you doing?” like an idiot. I had handed him those three hubcaps and he was standing there asking me what I was doing. I had to work a little harder on the fourth and was getting nervous, so I said, “Shut up.”

“You know I don't steal things.”

“You know I
do
,” I answered. Finally it came off.

Just then three guys came shooting out of that apartment house hollering at us. I took two running steps and saw Steve just standing there, so I had to waste some breath screaming, “Move it!” before he woke up and ran. About two blocks later he realized he was still carrying the hubcaps and threw them down, the dummy. That wasn't going to stop those guys.

They had been swearing at us, but were saving their breath. One stopped to get the hubcaps; I figured one wouldn't do me any good and threw mine away a block later. That stopped another one. The third guy kept on after us.

Steve was keeping up better than I thought he would, but my side was killing me. I turned down an alley and cut across a fence. Steve followed with a desperate look on his face that made me want to laugh.

The fence slowed down that guy who was chasing us, but it didn't stop him. Man, he was out for blood. I ran into an apartment house and shot up the stairs, got to the top and ran out onto the roof. It was a good-sized jump to the next roof, but I made it easy. I was tearing off across it for the next one, when I noticed Steve wasn't with me.

He had stopped at the gap between roofs. He was almost doubled over from trying to catch his breath.

“Come on,” I said. I wasn't sure we had lost that guy.

“I can't make it.”

“Yeah, you can. Come on.”

Steve just shook his head. I told him what would happen to him if he got caught. I made it sound worse than falling off the roof. Anyway, it was only two floors up. I'd dropped off a two-story roof before and only broke my ankle. I did it on a dare.

“Come on,” I said. “I'll catch ya.”

Steve looked back at the door, then down at the alley, backed up a few feet and jumped. He didn't know how to do it right at all. But for some reason he made it, landing across his belly on the ledge. He was so surprised he made it that he forgot to hang on and just slipped down. He would have gone all the way down if I hadn't caught his wrist. He hung there hollering his head off, till I said, “If you don't shut up I'll drop you.”

I wasn't threatening him; I was just telling the truth. I kept trying to haul him up, but it wasn't easy. I was hurting pretty bad, too.

“And don't look at me like a rabbit, neither,” I panted.

He was trying to get a toehold on the wall. He worked so hard to change the expression on his face so he wouldn't look like a rabbit that it almost made me laugh and drop him. Finally, he climbed and clawed his way on up. We just sat there trying to breathe again. I kept listening for that guy who was chasing us. Finally I figured we'd lost him.

“I guess we didn't need to do that,” I said. “He ain't comin' up here.”

I didn't notice till then that Steve was shaking pretty bad.

“We didn't need to do that, huh?” he said, and really swore at me. I just sat there and tried not to laugh.

“You shouldn'ta throwed them hubcaps away,” I said. “I coulda got twenty bucks for 'em.”

“You were stealing them.” He said it like he was really telling me something new.

“So what. They stole 'em from somebody else.”

“That isn't any reason.”

I started to answer him, then thought, Why bother? We'd had this argument before.

“You all right?” he asked. I said no, and passed out cold. What with all that running and jumping around and bleeding and not eating anything that day, I was in pretty bad shape.

I wasn't out too long, just long enough to scare Steve into looking for some help, so when I came to I was laying there on the roof by myself. I fixed that as soon as possible, almost running to the roof door. I bumped into Steve and some old lady he'd talked into coming to help. I don't know what the hell he thought she should do. I said, “Let's go,” and got out of there. That lady was real unhappy about being dragged up there.

I was so mad at Steve for going off and leaving me that it took me about three blocks of fast walking to see that he was crying. That scared the hell out of me. I'd never seen anybody but girls cry, and I couldn't ever remember doing it myself.

“What's with you?” I asked him.

“Just shut up,” he said. “Just shut the hell up.”

Now that wasn't like him at all. I decided he must still be worrying about his mother. I couldn't remember mine, so I didn't know how he felt.