Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

  I sat back in my chair and crossed my legs and smiled inside and I thought, This is gonna be some wicked strange adventure. I’m thinking, Bone, man, wherever you were before you’re on the other side now.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SUNSPLASHED

  Even though it was summertime our fellow passengers after the Miami airport anyhow were mostly tourists I guess taking advantage of bargain rates which is how the one guy who was sitting next to me explained it when I asked him why he was going to Jamaica now instead of waiting for winter.

  It’s off season, kid. Cheapereno, he said. Plus it’s a package. Which means you don’t have to leave the hotel for anything. You know what I’m saying? Whatever you want, they got it right there at the hotel. You get me, kid? he says like wink-wink nudge-nudge.

  Yeah but don’t you want to travel around some? You know, like maybe get out and see the country, do some trampoosing, man.

  Naw. We’re comin’ to party!

  Meaning him and about thirty or forty of the others on the plane who all had these couch-potato bodies and big hair and wore acid-washed designer jeans and tanktops, both the guys and the females who were about half of the group. Some of them were already wearing these straw hats they’d gotten in the airport. Miller-timers I call them. People who don’t like to leave home without their ice chest.

  Jamaica’s a long ways for a party, I said.

  He goes, Yeah! like that’s the point. They looked like they were into getting seriously laid a lot and by black people if possible and smoking some heavy reefer and snorting coke only they were too uptight to do it in America so I didn’t push it. I guess you do what you can where you can.

  They were older singles in their twenties and thirties from Indiana and I think they all lived in the same condo development and had cheesy jobs like in malls and I guess they didn’t travel much because when the plane landed even though it was dark down there and you couldn’t see anything out the window yet except the lights of Jamaica which are the same as the lights of anywhere they all clapped and cheered and hollered Yes-s-sss! and All right!

  The guy beside me pumped his fist and grinned and said, Let the games begin!

  Go for the gold, man, I said and pulled my backpack and I-Man’s flight bag and boom box down from the overhead bin and brought I-Man his Jah-stick from where the lady had asked him to stow it up front and he’d said no problem. Up to now I’d never even been as far as Albany and here I was like in a foreign country which the first time can be a real shock to the system. Except I was with I-Man who even though he was a foreigner to most people to me he was my homeboy practically and my spiritual guide and on his native ground now so I could be cool and just follow along behind him like I was only going to Albany instead of Jamaica and I went there all the time.

  When we’d stopped off and the plane was waiting I guess for gas in Miami me and I-Man’d walked around the airport a little and took a piss and so on and watched the Indiana party animals so it wasn’t like we were actually anywhere then except normal America where it’s mostly white people running things. But when we got off the plane in Jamaica it was real different. All the people in charge were black for starters and that can throw you off if you’re an American. I was pretty used to that from hanging with I-Man of course but it was weird to see my fellow white Americans getting suddenly all nervous and loud and dumb like they couldn’t read the signs and the black people couldn’t speak English.

  They were scared I guess and when they were getting their suitcases off of the conveyor belt they started yelling and grabbing their stuff and dropping it and generally fucking up so the Jamaican airport guys had to pay a lot of attention to them to get them to go where they were supposed to for having their bags checked for drugs and such and for getting their papers stamped. Plus it was really hot even though it was night and everybody was sweating like mad which they weren’t used to and which I think pissed them off like they’d expected the whole country to be air-conditioned. Me and I-Man already had our bags and didn’t have any papers to get stamped on account of I-Man’d said not to bother filling them out when they gave them to us on the plane. No need fe deal wi’ Babylon, Bone, he’d said when I asked the guy next to me for his pen when he was through. Forget-tee, he said which was one of his favorite words. Forget-tee.

  Now though I wasn’t so sure with all these soldiers and customs guys checking everybody out but I just followed I-Man and his magic Jah-stick as he stepped away from the Americans struggling to find their bags and crossed the room to this one guy who stood by the gate and looked like he was the head customs guy, this big potbellied black dude with sunglasses and a mustache and a toothpick in his mouth and a clipboard in his hand.

  He would’ve been the main guy to avoid if I’d’ve been alone but I-Man just comes right up on him and they start talking in Jamaican which I’d never heard I-Man do before, he’d always talked English before which I’d thought was his native language. But they have this other native language that they only use with their fellow Jamaicans. It has quite a lot of English words in it but it’s mostly African I think. I got so eventually I could understand it pretty good but the first few times I heard it they could’ve been jabbering in French or Russian for all I knew.

  Anyhow from what I could figure the customs guy and I-Man were like true homeys or something because after they exchanged views for a few minutes he just waved us through this separate little gate and we’re suddenly out in the main part of the airport which is open to the street and there’s all these Jamaicans with vans and taxis waiting, fifty or a hundred of them, some with hotel signs and even buses waiting and a whole bunch of women carrying huge trays of souvenirs and Jamaican shirts and straw hats and so on and some skinny kids standing around ready to panhandle or whatever and these tall cool dudes in sunglasses even though it’s night with short natty locks and their belts undone and their flies half open, evil-looking guys who’re probably coke dealers or just trying to look generally available for white chicks from Indiana and everybody’s watching the gates and waiting to pounce as soon as they see a regular American come out. There were some cops too in striped short-sleeved shirts and blue pants who were mainly watching the Jamaican civilians, probably to keep them from scaring the party animals when they came out and realized that they hadn’t been safely herded inside their hotel yet.

  Me and I-Man though, we were like invisible I guess because nobody even noticed us. We walked past everyone down the crowded road to the main road where I-Man turned left and then we walked at a good clip away from the airport into the darkness and suddenly we were surrounded by this strange silence although I thought I could hear waves of the ocean breaking off to our left a ways. I could tell from the lights behind us that the town which I guessed was Montego Bay was in the opposite direction so I said to I-Man, Where we headed now? and he goes, Not far, Bone. We gwan jine de lion in his kingdom.

  That’s cool, I said. For a long time though we kept walking along the side of the road. Now and then I could see the light of a house in the distance and here came a bus or a car that blew by and I could hear a dog bark sometimes. Otherwise darkness and except for the sound of our sandals and the click of I-Man’s Jah-stick against the pavement, silence. I had about a thousand more questions to ask but I knew I wouldn’t’ve understood the answers, it was still too soon so I just marched along behind I-Man and didn’t say anything. I was like a clueless newbie. It was incredibly hot and the air was soft and really wet, it smelled like woodsmoke and curried ocean water or something which was a whole new smell to me, strange and not a good one either and I’m thinking like maybe I’m on a different planet than the one I originally came from, maybe I’m actually the pod boy from earth not Mars and for the first time since the plane took off in Vermont which was the first time in my life I’d done that I got really scared, I’m thinking like maybe I won’t be able to breathe right, maybe there’s too much oxygen here or maybe there’s some weird Jamaican marsh gas in th
e air and it’s fine for I-Man, he’s got gills or whatever but me, on account of growing up in New York State and all I’m not physically equipped to do this. Travel is good for you, I kept saying to myself, it broadens you and extends your horizons et cetera but way down deep I was wishing I was back in Plattsburgh in the schoolbus again, just another homeless northcountry mall rat dodging the cops and copping a J now and then and spare-changing my way from day to day until my mom finally saw the light and split from Ken so I could go home and grow up living with her as her son again.

  Just then I-Man turned off the road and went down into like a ditch and over a low rock fence. There was a little moonlight now and I could see this goat standing on the fence gazing at us with these glazed pale eyes and I watched back because I’d only seen goats in pictures before and didn’t know if they bite. Come, Bone, I-Man said so I followed him and the goat didn’t do anything.

  It turned out we were on this path that cut through some palm tree woods and pretty soon we were down on the beach walking along on the sand. There were waves coming in, these strange low peaceful kinds of waves, not surfer waves like you’d’ve thought from it being a real ocean and suddenly the clouds broke open and a big silver moon came out and I could see a little of where I was then, on a long strand of beach with a tangled hedge of low bushes on one side and silhouetted palm trees in back like on a postcard and mountains humped up behind and the water was dark and velvety soft in the moonlight and the clouds got all bright and were edged like in melted silver. It was wicked beautiful.

  Now that same warm soft wet air seemed totally natural to me and the smell was like a flowery perfume instead of like somebody’d just pissed on a woodfire and I wasn’t wishing I could go back to Plattsburgh anymore. I was reminding myself that with I-Man and Sister Rose gone and Russ making it in the straight world I’d be all alone up there and pretty soon it’d start getting cold again and the snow would come cruising in from Canada and all the plants and vegetables in I-Man’s groundation would freeze and die and I’d probably start getting into panhandling for crack I’d be so bummed from that kind of life and it’d be downhill from there for sure. And my mom I knew wasn’t going to see the light. No way. No, I was definitely going to have to become a brand-new beggar. Just like I-Man said.

  After a while we ended up cutting off from the beach and went back into the bushes on a zigzaggy path I’d’ve never seen on my own if I hadn’t been following I-Man. Finally we came to this bamboo fence with a gate that had a red and green and gold lion’s head painted on it and when we went through the gate there was this little sandy yard and then I-Man picked up a candle from a shelf beside a door and lit it and went through the door into a bamboo cave which was actually a house, this incredible house with high steep ceilings that were thatched like in Africa and walls built entirely out of bamboo tied together with vines and there were all these little circular rooms and hallways going off of each other in a hundred different directions like an ant farm I once made for school.

  The rooms had bunches of huge pillows placed around the walls for sitting on like in a harem and hammocks for sleeping in and low tables and curtains made out of beads hanging at the doors and pictures of Rasta heroes on the walls like Marcus Garvey who I-Man said was the first Jamaican to figure out how to get back to Africa and Martin Luther King who I recognized on my own and an African king in a suit named Mandela I-Man told me when I said who’s that and of course the head Rasta, Haile Selassie himself, Negus of Bathsheba, Emperor of Ethiopia, Jah Rastafar-i. I was learning a lot.

  Except for the pictures and the pillows and hammocks and the bead curtains everything else in the house was handmade including the picture frames out of bamboo. It was like Bamboo World, a Rasta theme park and definitely the coolest squat I’d ever seen. It really blew me away so I go, This is cool, man, which sounded so stupid I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Plattsburgh, New York, that’s where I belonged.

  Lion in his kingdom fear no one, Bone. Nyah Bingh in his kingdom, twelve tribe in his kingdom, Bobo in his kingdom, he’s like chanting from a pillow where he’d sat down and was now filling the biggest best bong I’d ever seen from a huge bowl of ganja. No matter where we go, we de lion in his kingdom. Sattar, Bone, an’ smoke from de chalice.

  He was off on a Rasta-rap, a kind of homecoming high I guess and I could dig that even though it sort of weirded me but by now everything else was so different from my previous life that there probably wasn’t much left that could make me freak and besides I was interested in doing a load myself so I said, This is like your squat, right? Your Jamaican crib? And nobody else knows about it?

  He was pulling these huge draws in by now, his head surrounded by spiraling clouds of smoke, the chalice bubbling and burping away and I was already lifted just from the secondhand smoke. He goes, I-and-I gots to be smart to prevent dem from tumble down on I-and-I. People of de world who see I-works an’ know of I wants to tumble down on I, backbiters-dem wants to tumble down on I, criticism-dem wants to tumble down on I, badminded-dem wants to tumble down on I. . . .

  That’s excellent, man. Lemme have a hit, I said and he handed me the chalice and off I go, more toasted in a few seconds than I actually want to be and suddenly I’m scared of losing my brains which almost never happens to me when I smoke so I tried to fake it by not inhaling so much and handed the chalice back to I-Man who was lying back on the pillow across from me a few seconds ago only he was gone now but it was too late, I was flying, the harem room was flying, the bamboo ant farm was flying, the whole world was flying through the known and unknown universe into like deep space where no boy has dared to boldly go before. I thought I saw I-Man but he turned into this tall Rasta guy I’d never seen before with dreads tied up like a huge soft bow on his head and there were a couple of other Rastas who walked past all drifty and mellow and I could hear reggae tunes coming from someplace sometimes real loud with words and chants and then just the heavy beat real quiet and no words and pretty soon it was silent.

  I was slumped over sitting on one of the pillows watching the candle flame when suddenly this spider came drifting down from the ceiling and hovered over the flame for a minute and then like it’d gotten too hot the spider started trying to climb back up on its web. It struggled and fought but it was too late, the web turned into a gold wire and the spider lost it and dropped onto the flame where it got instantly crisped and its tiny ashy body floated up on the heat a ways and then it disappeared into thin air.

  I was almost crying then. I’d done it, I’d moved the candle under the spider on purpose, it was all my fault. I tried to stand up but couldn’t so I crawled around the room on my hands and knees like a baby looking for I-Man and then down this dark hallway thinking maybe if I could find a peaceful corner I could curl up in with my back to the wall nothing could sneak up and surprise me, goats or lions or avenging spiders but the hall kept curving around until finally I came to a door and pushed it open and I was outside in the sandy yard and the sky was clear and there were millions of stars swimming overhead like fish in schools or birds flying in flocks and the moon was splashing everything on earth with this dry white powder like flour.

  I could stand up now so I did and managed to get to the gate in the bamboo fence and out and then I let my feet kind of lead me along the path in the general direction of the ocean which I could locate okay from the sound of the waves until I came out on the beach and plopped down there on the white sand and just watched the waves coming in over and over friendly and slow and no surprises until my heart stopped pounding and I wasn’t breathing so hard and fast anymore. I didn’t think I could find my way back to the ant farm again, I actually didn’t want to go back there yet so I decided to just chill on the beach for the night and wait till daylight to figure out what to do next. I was totally bummed. This was a new kind of loneliness for me. It made me want to stay away from people forever.

  That didn’t last, naturally. The next morning I’m sitting on the beach watching th
is atomic sunrise going on way out at the horizon beyond the gray ocean with sheets of red and yellow and pink clouds going nuts out there and the water all streaky like with blood which is definitely not what you see at dawn in upstate New York after blasting your brains on skunk the night before, and suddenly there was I-Man squatting down beside me. I was real glad to see his familiar brown face, like it was a relative’s face and I didn’t feel lonely anymore.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and said he had some food fe strengthen de structure and fe repair de damage from our long journey out of Babylon so I followed him back up to the ant farm where there were these other Rastas squatting around on their heels in the yard smoking spliffs and makin’ chat as I-Man says who he introduced me to, Fattis and Buju and Prince Shabba that he said were his posse.

  Prince Shabba I recognized from the night before on account of his humongous bowtie hairdo and the other two were kind of familiar too. They were younger than I-Man, in their thirties or forties maybe, it’s hard to tell because they were skinny dudes and their huge long dreads were kind of distracting and white people even me have trouble telling the age of black adults except by their clothes until they’re really up there like I-Man. They talked to each other in their native language so I didn’t catch much of what they were saying and basically they ignored me, even I-Man which was cool because I figured I’d be smart to just hang and watch and learn what I could before branching out on my own again because these dudes who were basically different from me inside as much as out were also very well adapted to their environment which gave me a good idea of the danger I was in every time I took what I thought was an innocent step.

  Like their environment was now mine and the ant farm was definitely not some package-tour hotel for Miller-timers from Indiana. So I just did what I-Man told me, ate when he said and what he said, drank what he gave me and only took real light nips of kali off of the chillum pipe when he passed it over to me and kept the spliffs moving down the line like I had plenty at home for later. No more buster-freak for Bone.