Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks Page B

minutes he came out with a bag of groceries and got into his truck and started to back out but then he suddenly stopped and jumped down from the cab and with the motor still running walked slowly back inside the store like he’d forgotten something he was supposed to bring home for the wife and was pissed.
    Russ ran around to the front of the store, took a quick look through the window and came back to the dumpster and said it was cool, the guy had his head in the ice cream freezer. We scooted across the lot and Russ jumped in on the driver’s side and I climbed in beside him and we were outa there.
    At first I thought Russ was going the wrong way but it was only a deceptive maneuver to make the guy or anyone who saw his truck leaving the lot think we were headed west in the direction of Lake Placid instead of east to Plattsburgh. As soon as we’d gone a few blocks he cut left and zipped back on River Street which turns into River Road and then crosses the river on this old wooden bridge outside of town a ways where it connects a few miles further on to the main road to Plattsburgh.
    A few minutes later we were doing eighty headed east on Route 9N smoking the fireguy’s cigarettes from the carton of Camel Lights I’d found in his grocery bag and laughing like crazy. There was other good stuff in there too—a twelve-pack of Bud kings, Fritos, some chips, and some Kotexes probably for the guy’s wife which naturally caused Russ to make a couple of his cruder jokes but I didn’t mind because for the moment at least we were like free, free to just be ourselves, driving fast with the windows down and the heater blasting, smoking cigarettes and eating junk food and drinking beer and crankin’ with Nirvana’s Serve the Servants on WIZN screaming from the speakers. It was definitely cool. We even switched on the blue bubble light so if anyone saw us they’d think we were heading for a fire.
    Russ said, Yesss! and pumped his fist and I said, Yesss! and did the same although it felt a little stupid because of everything that’d happened. But life is short I guess and you have to celebrate it when you can so that’s basically what we did.
    We stayed off the Northway and shut off the bubble light because there was likely to be staties cruising and took the back roads into Plattsburgh and parked the pickup in a used-car lot out on Mechanic Street where there were fifty or sixty used trucks for sale. It was around midnight by then and not much traffic and only a few local cops who were probably drinking coffee over at Dunkin’ Donuts so there was very little danger of us getting caught.
    After Russ took the number plates off the truck with this screwdriver he found in the glove compartment the fireguy’s Ranger looked like all the other pickups on the lot. Russ figured it wouldn’t be discovered there until somebody tried to buy it or else they did an inventory and when they did no way it could be tied to us. Russ was good at criminal activities and even when he was doing something for the first time it seemed like he’d already done it twice last week.
    The number plates he put in the bag with the beer and stuff because he figured maybe we could sell them if we met somebody who was into stealing cars and then we booked on foot for the dudes who lived in the bus, which wasn’t very far, Russ said.
    It was out past these old warehouses and junkyards where there weren’t any regular homes or stores and you had to go through a break in a chain-link fence and cross a huge field where people had dumped old tires and refrigerators and such. It was kind of spooky out there in the dark lugging the grocery bag over the rough crumbly ground with the wind blowing and everything smelling wet and rusty like it was a hazardous waste site or something. Russ said he’d only been out here once when he took home this girl he’d picked up at the mall and it turned out she was