Page 5 of Rumble Fish

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.

4

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."

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