[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Although Bone and Russ hail from the Adirondackarea, they remain ignorant of the furniture s cost, unique aesthetic, and regionalhistory.Russ deserts Bone as summer approaches (Russ knew the owners wouldsoon return) and returns to the Buck Rogers safety of his planet Earth home.Bone finds a gun, but unlike Huck with a stolen gun, he decides to irresponsiblyassert his new menacing Bone identity.Banks emphasizes the narcissism of this initiation ritual by having Bonestand before a mirror while addressing himself in a rambling monologue onhis new identity, depicting himself as his own schizophrenic best friend.8 In adramatic scene, he kills the immense picture window the splaying, shatteredshards symbolizing the death of his identity as Chappie and the confirmedascendancy of Bone s new and dangerous ego that seethes with contempt forthose who live the life of privilege.But unlike the doomed narrator of the nov-ella Family Life, Bone will escape the curse associated with shattered glass.The episode of the shattered glass presents the crossing of that threshold whichevery hero must walk through.But as with great heroic narratives, once thatthreshold is crossed,  One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardianswill appear. 9 And so they do.They put Bone on the right path rather than thelooming wrong path.Bone the drifter hits the road with his thumb out.The picaresque genre tra-ditionally indulges in the improbability of unlikely chance meetings and thisnovel is no exception.Buster Brown, in a van with a young pixie, picks up Bone.Buster calls the girl Froggy.Froggy was the echo character from the AndyDevine show (Andy s Gang on NBC from 1955 to 1960) who would spinelesslyassure the host that he was always right in a witty comic routine that parodiedthe need for ego massage.Like Devine s yes-yes puppet, Froggy has no opinionon anything from sunrise to sunset.(Buster Brown shoes sponsored the show,although Bone, and most readers, would be too young to know any of this.)It turns out that Buster dabbles as a small-time band manager and his bandhas a gig at the state university in Plattsburgh, but he owes the band consider-able backpay and there s the matter of other financial negotiations.He has abackpay stash that he was going to let Froggy hold because he doesn t want toenter the bar where he s meeting the band with the money in his pocket, butFroggy is a little slow on the uptake of anything, so he entrusts the money toBone for safekeeping.Buster enters the bar; a little while later there s a brawlwith the fight spilling out into the street.Bone sees his opportunity and splitswith both the money and Froggy, returning to the abandoned bus.In a reversalof age motifs, Froggy appears as his new guardian, a waif Beatrice with not athought in her head.Instead of the despicable Bong Brothers, there s a Jamaican Rasta livingthere.I-Man, as he calls himself, becomes the youngsters substitute father.The derelict communal bus now becomes an example of how the true counter-culture commune may have sometime operated in the unnoticed rural world.Impressed by the informal gentility of I-Man s religion (as well as the continuousRambling Picaresque: Rule of the Bone 117supply of I-Man s weed), Bone falls under I-Man s tutelage.Bone marvels thatI-Man takes religion seriously and is not a hypocrite, except in the small, practi-cal details that concern survival.Waking up in the morning to all the plantsdripping dew inside the bus, Bone describes the bus as a Garden of Eden.Theodd trio enjoys a peaceful Edenic communal interlude before reality wrenchesthem back to its obscene playbook.Through a helpful telephone information operator (back in the days beforerobot computers took over communications), Bone eventually finds the phonenumber of Froggy s mother, a chain-smoking Nancy Riley in Milwaukee.Froggy sname is Rose, Rosie.Bone calls the disinterested mother who attempts to shakehim down for an air conditioner, then puts Rosie on a bus to Milwaukee fromAlbany.Hitching back from Albany, Bone gets a ride from a sporty TurboSaab it s the pleasant Ridgeways whose house Bone has trashed with suchabandoned glee.While trying to strike up a suitable conversation to impressthem, Bone lets the name of his friend Russ Rodgers slip out.Oh, they knowRuss very well! In an amusing and suspenseful scene, Bone struggles to hidehis identity as he gets a lift from the generous people he has so egregiouslyabused.Since Bone, under I-Man s tutelage, has now developed the requisitesincere heart that all heroes must have beating under their chest, guilt promptsthe anti-hero, now lolling in a lotus land of sweet marijuana, to change thedirection his life.First, Bone returns home to discover that his cat Willie has been run over bya car.He mounts a final confrontation with his stepfather when he arrives.Hismother has left his stepfather and the house reeks with the rancid scent ofempty beer bottles rolling under foot.Amid this squalor, his stepfather Kenattempts to rape Bone in the ass Chappie claims there has been a long historyof sexual abuse, whereby Ken had forced him as a young boy to perform oralsex on him.To defend himself, Bone pulls the gun from his backpack.Chappiewaits longingly for one more insult from Ken to pull the trigger but Ken collap-ses unexpectedly onto a couch in tears.Having for once triumphed over hisstepfather, Bone departs with his momentary dignity to visit his mother at work.In the chapter  Red Rover, he finds his mother at work and wants to tell herthe dark secret about Ken s abuse, but can t spit it out.He argues that his mothershould divorce Ken.When she defends Ken, saying Chappie is the problem, hefinds himself reduced to a childlike state of tears.He begins yelling that sheshould choose right now either Ken or him, comparing the choice to the child-ren s schoolyard game of Red Rover:I was remembering how when I was a little kid in the schoolyard we used to playRed Rover.I d let go of the hand of the kid on either side of me and I d step outthere in like no-man s land between the two lines all alone and exposed andeveryone looking at me and I d wind up and start running straight at the lineopposite as fast as I could.I was secretly glad to be captured [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]