Rule of the Bone

As Bone walks out of Au Sable in the rain, he has a recurring vision in his mind of killing Kenny, his mother, and then his grandmother. He plays the worst-case scenario backwards and forwards, thinking that if Willie the cat were alive things would have gone differently in his vision. He thinks to himself that “Sometimes I guess you had to do a bad thing in order not to do a worse thing that you can’t stop yourself from doing” (228). For Bone, the actions of the previous chapters are that bad thing.

Bone stops in the middle of the bridge over Ausable River and looks over the edge to the water hundreds of feet below. Bone steps over the railing and considers jumping, but the slippery concrete makes him realize that he doesn’t actually want to die. Before he can cross back over, though, a car comes by, which causes him to slip. He catches himself on the iron bars. Hanging there, he thinks of the classical music he heard once from someone’s car radio. For some reason, this memory gives him the strength he needs to pull himself up and over again. Kneeling and panting in the road, he digs the gun out of his bag and tosses it over the bridge.