49 pages • 1 hour read
Rule of the Bone
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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Adirondack Iron”
Chappie moves onto the biker gang’s couch permanently. It’s a chaotic life: There’s parties all night with hard drug use and a rotating group of dangerous men living in the apartment. As long as Chappie has marijuana for them, he’s welcome, though he and Russ are often afraid of the bikers, who are violent, openly-racist criminals. The head biker is a weightlifter named Bruce, who names the gang Adirondack Iron. Chappie thinks highly of Bruce, who is the only smart one; the other two bikers he knows best are Roundhouse, who Chappie thinks is harmless, and Joker, who collects guns and keeps Chappie on edge all the time.
During the winter, the bikers take up slam-dancing all night, which upsets Wanda LaGrande, the landlord and owner of the video store below them, where Russ works. One night, Russ comes up and says that she’s threatening to evict them unless he pays the rent he owes her. Russ and Chappie head downstairs to try to scam her; they think it will be easy, as she’s an alcoholic with a bad memory. When they get downstairs, she throws Russ’s shearling jacket at him and accuses him of stealing, which is true. She threatens to call the police, and Russ reminds her that the building should probably be condemned. She backs off, but Russ is still fired, and they are all going to be evicted.
Russ and Chappie talk about what to do; Chappie suggests that Russ sell his Camaro, but Russ refuses, saying, “That car’s all I got between me and total nothingness” (57). Chappie realizes that Russ is the same thing for him, and that if he lost Russ he’d have nothing. They sit there thinking, and Russ seems to be coming up with a scheme.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Presumed Dead”
Chappie starts missing his mother and his cat but knows he can’t go home without facing his stepfather. Meanwhile, his life in the apartment weighs on him, particularly being around Joker, who threatens him regularly. When Chappie returns to the apartment and sees it loaded up with boxes, Russ tells him the bikers have started stealing electronics with the help of Bart the security guard, who has been looking the other way. Chappie decides he wants no part of this, because he’s had enough trouble with stealing, but Russ wants to be involved.
For a while, things are stable: The bikers steal things, Russ helps some, and the apartment is calmer because the bikers are trying to lay low. One night, though, Bruce has had enough of Russ helping, and Russ says it’s fine, that he would never incriminate them, which Bruce takes as a threat. Chappie must intervene, and he and Russ drive off so everyone can cool down. Russ, angry and disrespected, decides he wants to get even and make a profit at the same time: He’s going to steal from the piles of electronics the bikers are waiting to sell and make some money from them on the side. Chappie realizes that this is an escalation from small-time dealing and decides he’s not ready to be a worse criminal than he already is.
Russ enacts his plan, moving a few pieces at a time before anyone wakes up. It works briefly, but one morning Bruce confronts Chappie about Russ’s whereabouts. Chappie tries to cover for Russ, but Bruce sees through it and says he’s going to kill Russ when he gets home. Bruce and the other bikers bind Chappie with duct tape and put him in Russ’s room, locking the door. Chappie hears them debate about whether to kill him; he thinks Bruce draws the line at killing teenagers in cold blood, but he’s not sure.
The bikers leave Chappie in there until dark. He manages to stand up and move the curtains to watch the window for Russ’s Camaro; when Russ arrives, he starts banging on the glass with his forehead. Russ comes in through the window and rescues Chappie. He asks if they’re locked in with Russ’s padlock, and Chappie says yes; Russ has the only key, so the bikers would have to break down the door to get to them. Russ takes the time to give Chappie some clothes to wear, including the jacket that Chappie sold him.
As they’re getting ready to leave, Chappie realizes that the space heater has set the curtains on fire. They flee, hiding in the abandoned liquor store nearby where Russ has been hiding his lifted electronics. The fire spreads through the building, and all the bikers emerge except Bruce. The two boys realize Bruce is trying to rescue Chappie. He wants to go try to save Bruce, but Russ stops him. When firetrucks and police arrive, the bikers scatter. Chappie and Russ watch the fire consume the building until it threatens to consume the liquor store as well. The two realize they’ll be presumed dead.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Skull & Bones”
Russ and Chappie decide to head out of town, but they can’t hitch or go get Russ’s Camaro without revealing they’re alive. Instead, they head to a convenience store and wait until a man leaves his keys in the ignition of his pickup after forgetting something inside. They take the truck and his groceries and head toward Plattsburgh.
When they arrive, Russ parks the truck in a used car lot and swaps the license plates, keeping the originals to sell. Then the two head toward an abandoned school bus Russ knows about. He was there once before when he gave a girl a ride. The bus is occupied by two homeless stoners, Richard and his brother James, and they agree to let Chappie and Russ stay if they share the groceries. Though Chappie thinks the bus is gross and creepy, he’s relieved to have a place to stay.
The next morning, Richard tells the story of how they came to have the bus: He claims it was involved in a horrible accident that killed many students, and that the brothers were home sick that day, so they considered the bus good karma. They got the bus for free from the school district and had someone haul it to the abandoned plot of land, where they used it to party until they ended up homeless and living in the bus instead.
James comes back to the bus with some stolen groceries and the local newspaper, which has a story about the fire. It confirms that the two boys are presumed dead, which the brothers think is cool. Reading the article, Russ confesses that he hates the bikers now, and he wants to get his Adirondack Iron tattoo changed. He gets the money for it by selling the license plates and keys to the stolen vehicle to the brothers.
Chappie and Russ head to town, where they talk about needing new identities. They kick around some names, and Russ settles on Buck. The tattoo artist they meet with says he’ll do a deal on two tattoos, one cover-up and one new tattoo of similar size. While he puts a panther over Russ’s tattoo, Chappie looks through an art book, settling on a pair of crossed bones because it looks evil and reminds him of Peter Pan. After they get their tattoos, Russ and Chappie settle on Chappie’s new name, Bone, which he’ll use for the reminder of the novel.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The apartment Chappie lives in is a dangerous place that has a clear power structure, with Chappie at the bottom. He lives on a couch in a raucous living room, surrounded by guns, drugs, and sex; during these chapters, his only concern is survival. His allies in the house—Bruce and Russ—aren’t much help, though Bruce does keep the other bikers off of Chappie’s back. It’s telling that Bruce is one of the characters who Chappie recalls fondly in the closing moments of the book, when in these chapters he is presented as strange and frightening. Part of this shift is due to Bruce trying to save him from the fire, but it also has something to do with Bruce being a powerful man who doesn’t victimize Chappie.
Russ and Chappie’s friendship is more complicated, and it is best represented by the shearling jacket that initially belongs to Chappie. It is traded to Russ when Chappie is low on funds, and there’s every indication that Russ will keep it. Russ is a character who is always working an angle, which is what gets him in trouble, whereas Chappie is concerned about how far Russ is willing to go to get ahead, and he actively thinks about the people around him in a way he thinks Russ doesn’t. When Russ rescues Chappie from the bikers, Russ gives the jacket back to Chappie, effectively declaring their mutual trust and need, at least for the time being.
The two brothers, Richard and James, embody a more traditional outsider’s idea of what homeless drug users are like: shiftless, full of wasted potential, and without motivation to do anything besides survive until the next high. Chappie’s disgust with them, and his reluctance to go down the road of crime that Russ is headed toward, is resistance against his own assumed future. Because of Ken’s sexual violence toward Chappie, he is a victim of circumstance—but so are these boys, and so is Russ. Chappie’s inability to empathize with them is an indication of his still-immature mindset and lays the groundwork for his character arc.
Chappie changing his name to Bone is the beginning of that arc: The tattoo he gets reminds him of Peter Pan (a sensitive boy who can never grow up) while still seeming threatening, and he lets the reader into the double meaning without telling Russ about it. For the rest of the novel, he uses his new name, only reverting to Chappie when he’s around his family again or needs to introduce himself to his biological father; it is a pointed rejection of his old life of abuse, but he will come to learn that rejection isn’t an act of growth or healing.
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