Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

  When my father wasn’t there the campers pretty much ignored me, even Evening Star so I could lurk in the background so to speak and check things out on my own with I-Man. Except for the three or four little kids from the neighborhood who did yard chores and ran errands for tips the Jamaicans were natties, these good-looking young dudes with starter dreads and terrific builds most of them walking around barefoot in only loose shorts that sometimes showed their units and making out on the couches and suchlike with the white American women and I suppose hooking up with them later. The females were like middle-aged but generally pretty hip and good-looking and I guess single or else their husbands were still back in the States making some more money or something. There were usually two or three of them, different ones because whenever Evening Star’d drive one down to the airport to go home to the States she’d come back with a new one to replace her or a few days later a taxi’d drive up the hill with one. The natties more or less stayed the same. It was a little weird to see older women acting like that and I could actually understand the natties better since they were mainly into hustling anyhow, Jamaica being such a poor country and all but the whole thing made me want to puke sometimes.

  It’s hard to explain. I usually don’t give a shit what other people do so long as it’s what they want to do. But it was like the white American females were into young black guys and were probably scared of hitting on a regular black guy from the States who would’ve known where they were coming from and would’ve told them to fuck off so instead they hooked up with these black dudes who were basically permanently broke and didn’t even know anybody they could steal off of for a living. I could tell the females felt superior to the natties, plus they could fly back to the States whenever they felt like it and live a regular life but the natties were stuck here hustling forever.

  Rent-a-Rastas, I-Man called them but I think he was pissed more because of the way they pretended to be followers of Jah like him and went around Rasta-rapping all the time about Babylon and Zion and one love and suchlike to impress the females, than because of them selling themselves so cheap. They weren’t exactly skeezers, those guys but when you thought about it if they were their price tag was too cheap. That’s what bugged me, I think. Like they got to hang out around the pool and smoke a lot of free ganja and all and snort some coke and listen to reggae on boss speakers and I guess for a Jamaican the food was pretty good at the Mothership because Evening Star liked putting out these awesome meals on the porch every night with candles and everything and they got to have sex with white women, but that was about it. No actual money changed hands. People who have to sell themselves ought to be paid in cash is what I think.

  Me the campers treated like just another neighborhood kid except when my father was around and suddenly I became the little prince. They handled I-Man though like he was a movie star or something due to him being a real heavy-dread Rasta-man from the olden days especially Evening Star and the natties who thought I-Man’d hung with Bob Marley and Toots and the Wailers and all which he probably did since Jamaica’s such a small country and back then in the seventies there weren’t that many real Rastas anyhow except for Bob and Toots and the rest of the Kingston reggae posse. They’d like ask him, I-Man, did you really know those guys? and he’d say, I-and-I an’ Ras-Bob, we be like brudders, mon. Toots-him, Toots be cool too. I-and-I an’ Toots an’ Bob, we be schoolbwoys togedder, mon. Then he’d go all dreamy like he was remembering the olden golden days in the ghetto so you couldn’t really tell, plus nobody’d push him very hard on the subject I guess because everybody even me wanted to believe we were hanging with this cool dude who’d been almost famous.

  In general I-Man chilled and ignored the poolside activities on account of having to meditate a lot and not being into any of the females but when he came around and joined the campers at the chillum pipe which he did on a regular basis they’d all deal with him like he was Grandfather Dread full of Irie wisdom and in a sense he was. He was into it too, I could see. He’d talk the talk and walk the walk. They’d come up and check out his awesome Jah-stick and a couple times one of the natties reached out to touch the lion’s head on top and got zapped just like the Delta Airlines lady in Burlington which really busted everybody’s brains when it happened and made them go all wide-eyed and respectful although by now I knew from checking it out at the ant farm once when he was sleeping that he’d just planted these tiny sewing needles into the lion’s head where the whiskers were and on the tip of each of the ears that you couldn’t see unless you got real close and he’d like move the stick a fraction and stick you good with one of the needles and you’d think it was Rasta magic. To me it was a joke but I didn’t say anything. I just made like I was used to magic from I-Man and touched the Jah-stick whenever I felt like it because you could avoid the pins easy if you knew they were there.

  Basically though for I-Man the situation was cool because he got to sell a whole lot of weed to the campers and their friends, so much that he had to make a trip every few days back down to the ant farm for more. Plus I think he’d started using the resident natties to do some dealing in the neighborhood so for him it was like setting up a branch office. For me it was okay too at least for now. I liked Evening Star quite a lot mainly because she was my father’s old lady but also she didn’t ignore me as much as most of the others did and asked me questions like what was my sign and so on. Plus she let me help with the cooking since from living with I-Man I already knew quite a bit about how to make Ital food, the main kind of food they had up there except when somebody came in from the States and brought a lot of what she called goodies that they couldn’t get in Jamaica like special canned hams and salamis and once even smoked oysters the same as I’d learned to enjoy during my days holed up with Russ at the Ridgeways’ summerhouse. I-Man of course didn’t eat any of that stuff but the natties’d all join in in spite of Rastafarians not being allowed to eat pig or any animal that comes from the ocean and doesn’t know how to swim, which is smoked oysters to a T. Also other good things like crabs and lobsters. People sitting around eating ham and oysters and suchlike’d send ol’ I-Man into a funk for days and he’d diss everybody for it especially the natties and then go hole up in the back of the livingroom alone in the dark with his arms crossed over his chest and like glower so I always ate the deaders in secret even though I myself never made any great claims to being a Rasta-in-training and didn’t have any image to protect. I just did it to be kind.

  My father came and went a lot and the deal was I’d help out around the Mothership for room and board when he was gone doing chores like the kids from the neighborhood and then when he was back at the Mothership him and me’d work hard at being a real father and son team going places together and talking about the past and all. It wasn’t like we went fishing or played baseball or anything cheesy like that, he wasn’t that kind of dude and I wasn’t either. It was more like he took me into Mobay in the Range Rover to score some coke off a guy who ran the Holiday Inn and another time we went out to Negril to do a money deal with a Jamaican real estate guy where you exchange American dollars for Jamaican money at a different rate than at the bank and he explained how this sort of thing worked which was pretty interesting and all in case I ever got my hands on some American cash.

  He was cool but he wasn’t what you’d call a normal father. He didn’t want me crashing with him in Kingston he said because he was gone all the time and the apartment was only a one-bedroom but I figured it was a girlfriend. He was the kind of guy who’d have one and Evening Star was the kind of old lady who wouldn’t give a shit as long as she didn’t have to deal with her in person and my father was too smart for that. I asked him about doctoring and he said he worked in a hospital in Kingston but didn’t seem to want to talk about it particularly so I didn’t push it. I guess it was like he’d done in Au Sable at the clinic when he was an x-ray expert under false pretenses and had gotten my mom to cover for him. He’d done a lot of trampoosing since he left Au Sable
and he sat up late sometimes with me and I-Man out on the porch when everybody else’d gone off to hook up, telling us about his travels to places like Florida and Haiti.

  One night he even apologized for abandoning me back when I was five. It was your mother, he said. If it hadn’t been for her I’d’ve never left you, Bone, he said. I liked it that he called me Bone when he knew he didn’t have to. Those days I’d’ve let him call me anything he wanted. He could’ve called me Buck.

  My mom’d wanted to throw him in jail for nonpayment of alimony, he explained and he knew if he was locked up he’d’ve only ended up ruining not just his own life but my life too because A, there was no way he could raise any money while he was in jail anyhow and B, he knew I’d have to grow up in a small town where everybody’d look down on me because my father was a jailbird, so before my mom and the sheriff could bust him he’d fled the country. He said he’d planned to make some money elsewhere so he could send it to me later like in secret but he was never able to figure out how to get it to me without my mom and the sheriff knowing. And there was no way once my mom got married again he was going to send her money so she could just hand it over to my stepfather who was a pure piece of shit. All these years, he told me, he’d been like waiting for me to come to him on my own. And now I’d done it.

  The Mothership was huge like a hotel with all these bedrooms on the second floor and there was a small empty one at the end of the long upstairs hall that Evening Star gave me for myself the first night that had two beds in it. The very next day my father and I got my stuff from the ant farm including my old stuffed woodcock and the classical CDs which I still hadn’t played and I moved in there more or less permanently and I-Man shared the room with me when he wasn’t down at the ant farm himself loading up on fresh weed or traveling around the countryside setting up branch offices or dealing it himself. Most of the rest of the bedrooms up there were for the visitors from the States and whoever they happened to hook up with, plus there was the poolhouse that had its own bedroom and kitchen and then a couple of cabins they called cabanas out in the woods by the garden that people slept in.

  Evening Star and my father who I’d started calling Pa by now so’s not to call him Dad like I did my stepfather slept in the master bedroom which was downstairs in back. They had like their own bathroom and a private screened-in porch and everything back there but they didn’t really sleep together like a married couple since Pa was a night owl, probably due to him liking coke so much and Evening Star was an early-to-bed early-to-rise kind of person which is generally true of people who’re into weed but still want to be in charge of things.

  Usually after a long day of slightly criminal activities with Pa and a night of father-son talk with him doing most of the talking and me most of the listening I’d go up the wide center stairs around two or three in the morning and crash. I-Man’d already be snoring but I’d still be wired especially if I’d had a taste of Pa’s coke so for hours I’d lie there listening to Pa walking around downstairs in the kitchen or playing old seventies tunes like the Bee Gees on the stereo in the livingroom until finally I fell asleep myself. Then real early the sun would wake me up since my room was on the east side of the house and no curtains and I’d hear Evening Star down below running the vacuum cleaner and washing dishes and emptying ashtrays. I was starting to wonder when they ever got it on.

  This one morning after the sun came up I couldn’t fall back to sleep so I came downstairs and over coffee me and Evening Star got to talking in the kitchen about my sign which is Leo the lion and seemed to impress her quite a lot due to how the Rastas always talk about Haile Selassie being the Lion of Judah and all. Your astrological sign, she said, is your entry point to the universe. It’s the place where y’all step off the astral plane, darlin’, and land on the planetary plane, and that’s why it determines your character and your fate!

  Yeah but there’s about eleven other signs, right? Twelve in all?

  That’s right! she said all excited.

  Like fucking duh, I’m thinking. But I go, That means one-twelfth of all the billions of people on earth have the same sign as me, okay? Millions and millions of people all over the world and they’re all like Leos, okay? With the same character and fate as me. Except so far like I haven’t run into a single person whose character and fate’re anything like mine. You know what I’m saying? Like maybe all the other Leos are living in China or someplace.

  No, no, no, honey, she said. Listen. Everybody on this planet is a unique creation. It’s very complicated, honey. Listen. Y’all have a rising sign and a falling sign, and so forth, and the other signs have an impact on your major sun sign, which is your birth sign, depending on how far or close they are. It’s very complicated, darlin’. They’re like planets affecting each other’s orbits around the sun. You know something, Bone, y’all should be more metaphysically open, she said. Then she asked me when my actual birthday was and I told her and she said that’s this week, only three days from now which surprised me because I hadn’t known what date it was for a long time, ever since I went back to the schoolbus after being at the Ridgeways’ and I thought my birthday was still a long ways off. We’ve got to give you a party, darlin’, she said. A birthday party!

  That’s cool, I said. And it was, even though I knew Evening Star was always looking for an excuse to toss a party and that’s all it was, an excuse. Still, nobody’d given me a party in a long time.

  My father had like his own driver who worked for the government or something and dropped him off and picked him up and stayed with relatives in Mobay when Pa was at the Mothership, and he was heading back over to Kingston the next day so Evening Star decided to put the party together that same night because like she said it’d be the first time me and him’d been together on my birthday since I was a teeny-weeny bwoy. That’s how she talked, a little of this and a little of that so you never knew who you’d be hearing, it might be a white middle-aged southern rich lady one minute or a regular kid like me using words like buff chick and crankin’ or a Rasta wannabe off on an Irie-rap or a kindergarten mommy at sand-box time which is what I got a lot of when it was just the two of us. I guess from being around so many different types of people all her life and smoking excellent herb all these many years she didn’t have any more words left inside her that were strong enough to block out the words coming from outside and I wondered what her thoughts were like when she was alone. She was like an actress who was playing a bunch of different people in a bunch of different plays all at the same time.

  Besides I-Man there were only two Jamaican dudes at the Mothership then, a heavyset guy in his thirties named Jason who said he was a champion dominoes player even though he wasn’t too bright but he was giving me lessons so I liked him and this half-Chinese half-African light-skinned dude named Toker with a Fu Manchu mustache and a great build like Bruce Lee’s who was into selling I-Man’s herb locally and used the Mothership as a base to crash in and get laid sometimes and do his karate exercises. Plus there were two American females there that week, this tall bony college professor named Cynthia who spent all day lying by the pool and reading until she got toasted at the chillum around sunset and then she liked to drink rum and dance with Jason or Toker and wasn’t bad at it either for a skinny white woman her age, and this other younger woman named Jan who was Evening Star’s cousin from New Orleans and was a poet and I could tell didn’t approve of the fun and games aspect of life at the Mothership but didn’t want to diss anybody for it either so she went along and tried to make like she was having a lot of fun visiting her weird cousin in Jamaica.

  Jan was more into the life of the natives so to speak than the others and she spent a lot of time trying to make I-Man and the natties give straight answers to questions about unemployment and family life and suchlike which are subjects they’re not used to talking about even though they know a lot about them from firsthand experience. I liked her though because she had a good low-voiced laugh and she’d break into it and sh
ake her head when Jason or one of the other natties’d try to explain for instance how he wanted to go to the States to earn money to support his five kids and their three mothers and maybe she could help him get his visa et cetera. Or like I-Man’d get all somber and say, In Jamaica de ’oman be like a shadow, Jan, an’ de mon be like an arrow, andjan’d give out her laugh and say, Ain’t that the truth, sugar!

  All that day Evening Star and I-Man hung in the kitchen cooking for the party while the other campers lounged around the Mothership as usual. Me and Pa and Jason spent the afternoon driving all over Mobay looking for a guy but never finding him that Pa knew who’d sell Jason a gun which he said he needed to kill a guy over in Negril who’d burned down his brother’s house. I didn’t think any of it was true, you hear a lot of stories like that and neither did Pa, but I could tell Pa was going to pay for the gun since Jason didn’t have any money of his own and then Jason’d end up owing it to him and it’d be like Pa having his own deputy with a gun who’d use it any way Pa wanted him to, which might come in handy someday. But we never found the guy.

  When we got back to the house around six there were all these balloons strung around and a huge sign made out of three whole bedsheets and hung between some trees that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE BONE!!! Music was blasting across the hills from the speakers by the pool where there were big flaming torches up on poles and coolers full of ice and Red Stripe beer and tables with all these platters of Ital food plus regular Jamaican beans and rice and so on set out on them and bottles of rum and other drinks and a whole goat roasting on a grill and a big pot of soup made from the goat’s head and guts including his balls called mannish waters. It really looked like an incredible party for a much-loved person was about to begin.

  Pretty soon practically the whole village started coming up the hill to the greathouse, families with little kids and old people and lots of natties from the neighborhood I’d seen chilling day and night down by the road to Mobay and I-Man’s dreadlocked posse from the ant farm even, Fattis and Prince Shabba and Buju who were real glad to see me and high-fived me like crazy plus a couple of white Jamaicans I’d never met before, heavy dudes with coffee-colored females who wore spiky high heels and showed lots of thigh, from Mobay I guess because they came in Benzes, and Pa’s driver was there with Pa’s black Buick and the customs guy I remembered from the airport, a huge crowd until the patios and porches and all around the pool and even the flower gardens were filled with people eating and drinking and dancing around to the music. Every time I looked Evening Star was at the center of the action like a dreadlocked white queen in a long lace dress you could almost see through and no underwear hugging and kissing people when they came up and telling them where the food was and the drinks and so on. I-Man was like consulting with his posse over a humongous chillum in the livingroom in front of his favorite Haitian picture, the one with the lion lying peacefully with the animals it usually eats. Cynthia and Jan were dancing with various and sundry Jamaican dudes while Jason tried to look like he was one of the people in charge by running the sound system and playing mostly dancehall and in between songs rapping on the mike like Yellowman the famous DJ and Toker showed off swimming laps until the pool got too crowded with kids jumping in. My father kind of drifted from one group to another looking cool and above it all and once in a while he’d see me and wink like we knew something nobody else did although I didn’t know what it was yet.