Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

  I-Man’s posse was a little like the men of Adirondack Iron except more mellow and at first I thought nonviolent until sometimes they’d be rapping and sucking on a chillum and they’d get all psyched from telling stories which I couldn’t understand and suddenly Fattis or Prince Shabba’d whip out an actual razor-sharp machete and start chopping the air with these vicious swipes and everybody’d laugh and holler like crazy. By then I knew enough of the language that I could tell they were talking about chopping people’s heads off and suchlike. Level de devil wid de bevel! Prince Shabba’d yell and he’d whack his machete into a coconut and split it in half.

  And just like the bikers the Rastas didn’t seem to have any regular jobs or families at least not at the ant farm and they spent most of their time hanging and getting high and fixing up the ant farm the way the bikers used to work on their hogs and instead of listening to headbang the Rastas were into constantly playing reggae on I-Man’s box which they called his master-blaster until the batteries ran out and then the same way the bikers used to send me and Russ out for pizza they’d send Fattis or Buju who was the youngest I guess into town for more batteries although I didn’t know yet what they did for money unless I-Man was spending what was left of Buster’s stash. Which was cool by me. I didn’t want it for myself, that’s for sure. I wanted it gone completely and batteries for I-Man’s blaster seemed a harmless way to make it disappear.

  We ate mainly stuff they cut off of the trees with their machetes and dug out of the ground and cooked over a fire in the yard, breadfruits which look like grapefruits only taste like bread and akee which are kind of like scrambled eggs when you cook them and your standard hairy green coconuts which they grind up the meat of and mix with everything and these long bananas you cut up and fry called plantains and soursops which’re sweet and creamy inside like custard and regular oranges and these long white yams and calalu and so on, a whole garden of excellent tropical food that grew around the ant farm among the trees and bushes in the same kind of screwy wandering garden as I-Man’d planted in the field around the schoolbus only here it seemed more natural.

  Sometimes we’d all go down to the beach and swim and they’d wash their dreadlocks and rub these green leaves all over them afterwards that left them shiny and black as licorice and then the posse’d play this game with a paddle and ball called cricket that was like baseball only slower and more like dancing and originally came from Africa I think although they threw the ball and hit it and caught it and ran back and forth more like a bunch of antelopes than crickets unless they have those kind there that leap about and run and stop. I-Man was good at what they called bowling and they always let him go first and he’d bowl for a long time only it was overhand and upside down from the kind of bowling I knew.

  Quite a few different people came by the ant farm, fellow Rastas and some regular Jamaicans and even a few Chinese guys and a couple of buff females one time who’d hang and smoke for an hour or two and then split and pretty soon I came to understand that I-Man and his posse were doing some serious ganja dealing on the side which explained a few things. They had like tubs of it stashed in the back rooms of the ant farm and they moved it in these paper bags like it was rice a pound at a time it looked like. The ant farm was a factory outlet for ganja and for a heavy pot smoker hanging there with I-Man and the posse was like dying and going to heaven except I was pretty cautious now due to so many things surprising me every day and only took my toke when it would’ve been weird or embarrassing not to.

  I was getting my picture of I-Man slightly revised you might say. I’d even seen some guns by now, Prince Shabba had one, a .45 I think and so did I-Man which he kept in his old flight bag that he took with him everywhere and of course the flashing machetes which these guys treated real casual like they were Swiss Army knives or something. Plus quite a lot of money was being passed around including to and from cops. One night the same potbellied dude who’d let me and I-Man walk through customs at the airport without checking came by the ant farm and left with a free pound of primo boom loaded with buds like he’d phoned in his order ahead. And there were the same cool dudes with their flies open as I’d noticed at the airport who came around every few days for a load and I pictured their customers the Miller-timers rolling joints in their hotel rooms getting too choked to think and paranoid and all and I almost felt sorry for them.

  I-Man and Prince Shabba and Fattis came and went from the ant farm a lot, making home deliveries I guess or bill collecting and whenever I-Man left the premises he took his blue bag and his Jah-stick and looked like a priest going on a pilgrimage. He was cool and I was proud to be under his protection which is basically how people treated me. Mostly though I did chores like sweeping the yard every day and lugging water with Buju from this spigot pipe up by the road where a lot of other Jamaicans came for their water with plastic buckets and pans, women and little half-naked kids and some wicked good-looking teenaged girls who I didn’t dare talk to or anything so me and Buju’d chat while our buckets filled about how he was going to Miami soon to work cutting cane or New York and pick apples like I-Man’d done and buy stuff. Not, I figured. He was like into video cameras and VCRs and big-screen TVs and so on that he wouldn’t’ve been able to even use at the ant farm on account of there being no electricity but he thought everything ran on batteries.

  He wasn’t much older than me and on the dim side but friendly and he had a good singing voice and knew all the reggae songs from I-Man’s box but I still couldn’t understand the words so I didn’t talk much, I mainly listened. I think except for I-Man they thought I was on the dim side myself, especially for a white American kid but it doesn’t hurt for people to think you’re not as bright as you are when you don’t know all the rules yet.

  Then this one afternoon Prince Shabba was gone off to Kingston or someplace and Fattis was asleep and Buju was making mugs out of bamboo for drinking and I-Man wanted to head out fe deal wi’ de brethren so he said for me to come along too. Come see de sights of Jamaica, Bone.

  Cool, I said and off we went through the bushes to the road where we caught a bus crammed full of regular Jamaicans and rode about five or six miles into Mobay which is their word for Montego Bay, this fairly big town the size of Plattsburgh only a lot more crowded. I didn’t know for sure how long I’d been at the ant farm, two or three weeks maybe but a long time so when I started seeing white people like you do here and there on the streets of Mobay or in cars they really stood out and looked like extra-terrestrials with their chalky skin and long narrow noses and scrappy hair and I kept checking them out like I wasn’t one myself on account of how weird they looked, even the quick jerky way they walked and how they waved their hands but not their arms when they talked and how they didn’t get right up in each other’s face and all when they met like I was used to by now but stood back a ways and talked from a distance.

  The streets were hot and crowded and muddy from a morning shower and where we got off the bus there were ten or twenty more buses unloading crowds of people with big burlap-wrapped bags of stuff, vegetables and fruits and even animals like chickens and pigs and goats and I saw that we were at this huge outdoor marketplace jammed with tables all loaded up with different kinds of goods, everything from rubber flip-flops and canned Spam to sugarcane and huge yams the size of your arm. It was the Jamaican equivalent of a mall I guess, with a special emphasis on food. And just like in a regular mall people were into socializing and hanging out and eating these little meat pies you can hold in your hand like tacos and sucking on stalks of sugarcane and cruising each other for different things from sex to gossip I guess or drugs.

  I-Man I soon realized was making his regular once-a-week deliveries to people who probably lived too far from the ant farm or were too busy to come there in person. He was carrying a dozen or so one-pound bricks of grade A sinsemilla inside his old flight bag and he’d come up on some guy selling green parrots in homemade cages and they’d rap for a few minutes about this and that an
d then he’d just pull out the ganja which was wrapped in brown paper and pass it over in plain sight of the cops who were all around the place. The parrot guy’d say thanks and stash the dope under his table and count out the hundred and fifty bucks or whatever was the going wholesale price, something I could never quite figure since I never saw any scales or anything and they mostly used Jamaican money which I wasn’t used to yet. I figured I-Man and his posse were middlemen though, not producers and there was wholesale which they did mostly at the ant farm and there was retail which they did out here on the streets and the more you bought the less it cost per pound unless they didn’t know you or you were a rich white guy which I guess is the same free enterprise system as everywhere.

  Speaking of money by now I wanted some of my own because of getting pissed from having to always bum cigarettes and beers and suchlike off of I-Man and the posse although nobody ever got uptight about it or anything due to the ant farm being like a commune and whenever I apologized for bumming another Craven A or a Red Stripe when the guys’d kick back over a few brewskies and cricket on the beach I-Man’d say, From each accordin’ to him ability, Bone, an’ to each accordin’ to him need. Which was irie with me except that without a little cash on hand my needs kept exceeding my abilities. My only previous work experience though was in dealing small-load dope and spare-changing neither of which was a useful skill here especially spare-changing. That is until at the marketplace in Mobay I started seeing all these white people mixed in with the Jamaicans.

  So I split off from I-Man for a while and tried hitting on some sunburned tourist types weating straw hats and carrying video cams and checking out the natives, male and female couples who sometimes are easier to spare-change because one of the two will try to harsh on the other for being too suspicious and he or usually she will give the poor kid a couple of quarters. I tried to look worried and scared and said I was on a class trip and my teacher and everybody else in the group’d left for Kingston in the van early without me and I just needed seventeen dollars to meet up with them or I’d miss the plane back to Connecticut and get left behind in Jamaica, which would’ve worked probably except that both the couples I hit on turned out to be German or Italian or something. They just shrugged and smiled and wagged their heads no comprendo until finally I gave up and held out my hand and said, Spare change, man? which I guess is universal because they said no loud and clear and acted disgusted that a white American boy’d act that way in front of all these poor starving Jamaicans.

  I was wishing I’d run into some of the Indiana party animals who I figured would be relieved to buy some ganja from a white kid who spoke regular English instead of having to deal with a scary black Jamaican like I-Man, exploit my fellow Americans’ race thing in other words, and who knows, if it worked turn it into a regular job with I-Man and the posse, specializing in paranoid package tourists at the hotels. Having their own white kid on the staff so to speak’d give I-Man and the posse a definite advantage over the competition when it came to the tourist trade, I thought and then I wondered if I-Man’d already figured that out long ago, back in Plattsburgh even and had just eased me along without me knowing it, recruiting me and this was all a sort of apprenticeship in the ganja trade and if I came up believing it was my idea instead of his I’d never feel like he’d victimized me or anything or that he’d taken advantage of an innocent kid.

  It wasn’t like Buster and Sister Rose. I mean, either way, whether it was my idea first or I-Man’s plan all along it didn’t matter once I was doing it because at any point along the way from the ferry ride across Lake Champlain to this morning in Mobay I could’ve said I’m outa here and I-Man would’ve said, Up to you, Bone. It’s important for me to remember that even though I-Man usually knew what I was going to do before I did a thing he never tried to make me do it.

  So anyhow just when I’m in the middle of deciding to reenter my old life of crime you might say I spot another white couple on the other side of the marketplace. They’re easy to pick out of course due to practically everyone else is black or at least brown and the couple is getting out of this big mud-spattered Range Rover and walking over to I-Man who greets them like he knows them from before. I could tell instantly they weren’t tourists. They were both older, like in their forties and tanned like they’d been living in Jamaica a long time and incredibly cool-looking, definitely cooler than any white people I’d seen here so far.

  The guy was real tall and skinny and clean-shaven but with a long ponytail and wearing a tan safari jacket and one of those great-white-hunter helmets like you see on lion tamers and reflector sunglasses. The woman had a Rasta tam on her head with brown matted dreadlocks sticking out and was wearing all these Rasta bracelets and necklaces and even though she was on the heavyset side and older she was surprisingly sexy even to me because of her red and green striped belly dancer pants with only a yellow bikini bra on top, plus she had great tits.

  I’m watching from across the market and I-Man passes the tall dude a brick of sens and the guy hands him some money and everybody does a power handshake even I-Man and the woman and touches fists a couple of times and then when the couple turns to go back to the Range Rover the man pulls off his shades and helmet and wipes off his face with his sleeve and suddenly my mouth goes dry and my eyes practically bug out of my head.

  I know him. I know his face, way down deep inside me, like in my chest I know him. And for the first time I understood why I’d decided to follow I-Man to Jamaica. I knew he’d be here. It’s my father! My real father! My mouth flopped open and I couldn’t say anything but in my mind I’m like calling him in this little boy’s voice, Daddy! Daddy! Over here, it’s me, your son Chappie!

  I didn’t once think it might be a case of mistaken identity, I knew absolutely it was him. I’d recognized his face the second I saw it from how I remembered it when I was a little kid and from the picture my grandmother had and he still looked a little like a tall thin JFK even with the ponytail. I remembered him from when I was with him all the time and he was still married to my mom and life was perfect. It was definitely my real father!

  I started running then, dodging around people and jumping over goats and chickens in cages and shoving my way up and down the long jammed aisles until I finally got to the other side of the huge tin-roofed market building where I blew by I-Man just as my father and the white Rasta woman slammed the doors of the Range Rover only about a hundred feet beyond and drove out of the lot between a bunch of buses onto a narrow street. My father was driving and they weren’t moving very fast due to the mud and deep ruts so I ran after them, right down the middle of the street with people jumping out of my way and dogs barking as I blasted past running faster than I’ve ever run before, stretching my legs out in front of me as far as they’d reach and pumping my arms and hollering, Wait up! Wait up! It’s me, it’s your son Chappie!

  I chased them down one street and then up another and was only a few yards behind them and even got close enough almost to jump onto the back bumper where I could’ve hung on to the spare tire and ridden there, when they turned onto a bigger street and the Rover speeded up some but I kept on running after and hollering even though my chest was burning and my legs felt like iron. I slipped once and fell down and scraped myself and got mud all over me but I scrambled back up and saw them still ahead of me but further away now and I ran after them anyhow but limping and both knees and the palm of one hand bleeding from when I fell. They got to the center of the town where there’s this big traffic circle but when I came to it the Rover was already on the far side with a big fountain in between us and it turned off there onto like a highway that led out of town and I heard my father shift into fourth gear and hit the gas and the Rover disappeared around the bend probably doing fifty already.

  For a long time I stood there with my heart pounding and my chest on fire and the only thought in my head was that at last I’d seen my father. My real father! Finally after all these years I’d come to Jamaica not knowin
g that I was looking for him even and then one day completely by accident I’d found him. And even though I’d lost him again I knew it was only temporary this time. I was bleeding and muddy and all but I felt like I’d finally woken up from one of those nightmares that trick you into thinking you’re awake and this is really happening. It was like this incredible relief.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  STARPORT

  After a minute or two of just standing there by the fountain like an idiot child sweaty and panting and bleeding from the knees and hands I came back to my senses and turned around and walked slowly back through town. As I walked people who must’ve seen me when I was running came up and patted me on the back and made sorrowful faces like they knew somehow that it was my father I’d been chasing and that I’d lost him again. I didn’t think I had though since this was the closest I’d ever been to finding him and now we were at least on the same island together but it was nice they sympathized. In the States the whole thing would’ve been a big joke.

  Finally I made it back to the marketplace where next to a table with all these Rasta carvings of African lions and noble black men with dreadlocks and such I saw I-Man standing in the shade smoking a spliff and chatting up the woodcarver who looked a lot like one of his own statues. There was this cop there, a young red-striper who seemed more interested in me than I-Man’s spliff and when I came up the cop says right away, You know ’im?

  Who? I-Man? Yeah, I guess so, I said thinking maybe it’s a trick and he’s going to bust the both of us or something although so far I hadn’t seen any signs that selling ganja was illegal in Jamaica except maybe in stores and even in stores you could buy it if you talked to the right guy.