Rumble Fish

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 f

inally. 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.