Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

  She kept me moving for a little afterwards but then gave up I guess due to my thoughts having returned and let go of my ass and flopped back on the cot all wet with sweat and smelling like cake. She was smiling though, I could see in the dim light coming through the shuttered window and she looked wonderful to me, an amazing new creature on the face of the earth like from a different species than me and ten times more beautiful. She was a naked adult woman and I’d never seen one up close and leisurely before so I just kind of took my time and gazed at her.

  I said I was sorry I came so fast but she said not to worry, I was really great and someday I’d be a worldclass lover. I had all the right moves, she said and she was proud and happy that she’d had the privilege of glimpsing my future which was a kind thing to do for a kid on his first try at regular sex, irregardless of his motives.

  Well, she said, time for me to get back to makin’ dinner for my guests. And then I’m gonna jump in the pool an’ cool off. What about you, sugar? We won’t eat till after dark, when Jason finally gets that goat barbecued. I wouldn’t have done it but I promised Rita and Dickie some irie Jamaican roast goat an’ they’re holding me to it, bad girls.

  I had my clothes back on and was standing next to the cot still kind of gazing at her beauty but my mind was clicking through the gears and moving rapidly on to the rest of my life. You know, I said to her, when I was out there like in Accompong I heard a few things. About Doc.

  Oh? she said all suspicious.

  Yeah, but nothing bad, you understand. One thing though I wanted to ask you before I talk to him about it myself.

  What’s that, honey?

  I heard he had another kid. Maybe more than one. Over in Kingston, you know? And I heard the mother was like Jamaican. I mean, some people knew he had a kid but not a white kid. That true?

  There’s a lot about Doc that nobody knows, sugar. He’s a mystery man.

  Yeah, but c’mon, you’d know if he had another kid than me. I don’t think it’s wrong or anything, you understand. It’s not like a sin, or a crime even. I just want to know and I can’t exactly ask him. Not right now anyhow.

  No, not now for sure. But. . . well, yes, he wouldn’t mind me telling you, I’m sure, he’s just a little embarrassed to do it himself. But yes, he does have another son. Actually two, I think. But who knows with Doc? There could be other families in other lands. He’s that kind of man, you know. Anyhow y’all shouldn’t be jealous or anything. Doc loves you the most, I know that personally. He’s told me that a hundred times.

  What about the mother, is she Jamaican?

  Yes. Yes, she is. A good woman too, as I’ve been led to believe, and Doc stays with her and Paul and his little brother when he’s in Kingston, and he stays with you and me when he’s over here! she said brightly.

  His son’s name is Paul? I said. The same as Doc’s?

  The older one is. I’m afraid I can’t recall the name of the other one or even if there’s but one. Paul’s the only name I’ve heard Doc say. Listen, sugar, I’ve got to get back to my stove now.

  How old’s the son named Paul?

  I don’t know, about ten, I guess. I’ve never met the boy. Not a teenager though. Now c’mon, we can chat about all this later. Right now I’ve got work to do, sweets. What’re you gonna do? Whyn’t y’all cool off in the pool?

  No, I’m gonna book, I said.

  Whatever do you mean, Bone?

  I’m leaving now.

  Oh Bone. Didn’t you like it with me? She made a pout. Don’t you want to do it again?

  Sure, but I’m leaving. Don’t take it wrong, it’s not about you.

  Oh now, Bone, you mustn’t be upset about Doc’s other family. I never should’ve told you.

  Naw, that doesn’t do anything to me one way or the other. In fact I feel a lot sorrier for them than for me. Especially the one named after him. I was only curious, that’s all. No, it’s on account of Doc himself that I’m leaving. If he wasn’t here, yeah, I might stay. But he is here.

  Listen, Doc won’t ever know about us, sugar. Trust me, she said. Who’s gonna tell him anyhow? You? she said and laughed.

  Yeah, well, I would if I could.

  Now don’t you get any bright ideas, sugar, she said and cinched her shift tightly at the waist. She was really in great shape for her age. She said, Y’all just wait till later this evening, sweetie. I’ll come tippy-toein’ down the hall to your little room an’ I’ll show you some tricks that’ll make your hair stand on end. Wait till everyone else’s gone off to bed. The evening star, don’t you know, is Venus. The goddess of love, sugar. An’ don’t you forget it.

  She gave me a kiss on the lips and ran her forefinger down my tee shirt from my collar bone to my belly button. Then she turned and smiled over her shoulder and pushed open the door and went back into the kitchen leaving me alone in the darkness with my thoughts which were setting up in my mind like slabs of concrete. They weren’t many but they were tough and hard and as I’ve found out since pretty near permanent.

  Dealing with my father was eased a lot due to him having passed out on the couch. The CD was silent now and when I came out through the kitchen once I knew Evening Star’d gone swimming I stopped at the doorway and for quite a few minutes stood watching Doc lying there on his back and he didn’t blink or move even afterwards when I came into the livingroom and picked up my backpack and Jah-stick. The sounds of naked women playing in the water drifted in from the pool and the bump of the diving board and so forth, and then somebody put a heavy reggae album on the big outdoor sound system and started blasting the jungle with it. Peter Tosh it was, Steppin’ Razor. Party time. Doc stirred but then lapsed back.

  For a few minutes more I stood over my father’s unconscious body and looked down and wondered how I could’ve thought once that he looked like JFK. He didn’t look any more like JFK than ol’ Buster Brown had or my stepfather Ken. I’d sure run into a lot of evil men in my short life so far, at least that’s how it seemed to me and I hoped it wasn’t going to be like this the rest of the way even though I was much better prepared now to deal with them than before. I was thinking probably John F. Kennedy himself if I’d’ve known him personally wouldn’t’ve looked anything like the man I’d imagined him as. Not necessarily worse or evil, just different. But Doc, my father, he looked evil. Even passed out like this. I almost felt sorry for him, like he was possessed.

  Anyhow I had my plan and started to put it in action then. No time for feeling sorry. Over on the end table next to the phone was a notepad and pencil and I ripped off a sheet and in large letters wrote out, THE BONE RULES, NEVER FORGET-TEE! At first I was going to just pin it to Doc’s silk shirt but I couldn’t find a pin anywhere. Then I had a better idea. I reached down into my pack and came out with the stuffed woodcock that I’d hauled around with me ever since the Ridgeways’. Inside the hollowed-out place where I’d once stashed Buster’s porn money I put the note with just enough of it showing so it wouldn’t get overlooked and then I stood the woodcock carefully on Doc’s chest facing him with its long beak almost touching Doc’s nose. The bird looked stupid standing there but sad and stern too, like the woodcock was me and I was giving my father the evil eye that when he came to it’d be the first thing he’d see, and if it didn’t make Doc change his ways of living right then and there maybe it’d give him a heart attack instead. Either way, it didn’t make no never-mind to me. Not anymore.

  I was in a mood to study for a while the one Haitian painting that I-Man’d loved so much but it was getting late in the day and the sun was fading fast so I had to get a move on. I was headed for the marina at Mobay and wanted to get to it before they closed and locked the gate. A couple of times last fall I’d gone there with I-Man to deliver herb and knew the routine and after around nine you can’t get out onto the docks where the boats are. I took the machete out of my pack then and hitched my backpack straps over my shoulders, picked up the machete in my left hand and my Jah-stick in the other and went straight
out to the patio to deal with Jason.

  He was standing on the other side of the waist-high barbecue pit which was about six feet long and made from cinderblocks with this long grill and a spit where he was slowly turning the charred body of the goat over the fire. I have to admit it smelled delicious. The pool was on the further side of the patio and beyond a high wall so up here by the barbecue you couldn’t see it or be seen from there either except by someone standing on the diving board. The females must’ve been paddling around calmly now though or chilling with a J because I couldn’t hear them anymore even between songs on the sound system. Jason didn’t notice me until I was almost up to him with the barbecue still between us and when he saw it was me he grinned like we were pals and said, Hey, Baby Doc! Respect, mon. Welcome home.

  No, mi not called Baby Doc no more, I said. I actually didn’t know what I was going to do or say to Jason, my plan wasn’t all that detailed. All I knew was that I was going to deal with him, whatever that meant. He saw the machete in my hand though and got suddenly serious and reached down beside him and grabbed up a machete of his own which was all bloody from butchering the goat and at that instant I felt like I was possessed, not by an evil spirit like Doc but possessed by the good spirit of I-Man. It was like my voice and words weren’t mine anymore but his, and my movements weren’t guided by me but by him.

  In a low dark voice I heard myself say, Me nyan come fe slay a mon when Jah can do de job more properly. Lissen mi, Jason. Mi come fe place a curse ’pon you, mon. Lissen mi, dis be de curse of Nonny, dat him who live by de sword shall die by de sword. Then I took a step forward and he raised his machete like to chop at me if I attacked him but I didn’t, all I did was gently place my machete on the grill below the body of the goat and step quickly away from it.

  The coals were red hot and the smoke made like a shifting gray curtain between me and Jason. He seemed confused and upset, maybe even scared a little.

  Y’ know, you fren’ him, I-Man dat ol’ Rasta-man, it be de Nighthawk who shoot him, de white man. Me couldn’ stop him, Bone. Him go crazy when him see de Rasta, jus’ pow-pow-pow like dat! Wid de Uzi, mon.

  I knew he was lying and if it hadn’t been for being possessed by I-Man I probably would’ve told him so but instead I said, Dat sword dere in de fire gwan kill you, Jason, gwan sattar in de fire till it red hot and den it rise up an’ fly ’cross de air an’ chop off you head from you neck, mon. De sword of virtue it be an’ it gwan slay de liar an’ de hypocrite wit’ a single stroke!

  I think he figured at that point I was looney-tunes and basically harmless because he laughed and grabbed the machete off the grill and now he had two machetes, one in each hand and he jumped up on top of the barbecue, not on the grill but on the cinderblocks around it which still must’ve been hot on his bare feet but he didn’t seem to mind. He was standing up there towering over me shirtless and in shorts with a machete in each hand and a wild crazy stoned look on his face. It was like a white man’s worst nightmare and if it hadn’t’ve been for I-Man still holding me under his control I’d’ve been outa there that second, no way I’m hanging around to discuss things, but instead the Jah-stick like takes on a life of its own and pulls itself forward in my hands and even though I’m yanking back on it trying to keep it from jabbing at Jason I can’t and the lion’s head at the top of the stick heads right for Jason’s face and jacks him in the eyes. He howls in pain and the machetes go clanking and he slips and falls onto the grill knocking the goat off the spit and burning the shit out of himself and now he’s really screaming in pain and I don’t know how to help him except by running around the barbecue to the other side and steering him as fast as I can down the steps toward the pool where the females are out in the middle with their hands over their mouths and looking on in horror as I push Jason into the pool.

  And book. As fast as I can and without once looking back I race up the steps again and grab the Jah-stick and run full speed down the long driveway past all the sad little red-eyed rabbits and foxes and so on and through the gate to the lane and down the long hill past the cabins and houses of the local people who watch me and a few wave but I don’t wave back. I just keep on running.

  CHAPTER TWETY-TWO

  SHIPPING OUT

  And that’s about it, pretty much the whole story up to now. Except to tell how I got off of the island of Jamaica which is no big deal since it was basically pure luck.

  The reason I’d decided to light out for the marina once I’d made my exit at Starport was I knew quite a few yachts and private charter boats came and went from there to all over the Caribbean and some of the captains of those boats weren’t too fussy who came and went with them so long as you were willing to work hard for bad food and no pay or almost none. How I knew this was I-Man’d done a little lunchtime dealing over the years with the various guys who worked in the boatyard and on the docks and he’d gotten to know the crews and even a few captains who made regular stops there for water and gas and other supplies, including Jamaican mountain-grown ganja for themselves and their customers too sometimes, the rich people who either owned the boats and just liked to ride around in them or the not-so-rich people on vacation who rented them.

  Last summer before we fled into the hills of Accompong there’d been three or four times that me and I-Man’d made ganja deliveries at the marina and hung out there chatting up the customers like I-Man always did when he made a delivery. It was part of the service I guess, plus it was how he got information about the cops and so on and how he made new contacts for future sales. I used to think I-Man was too sociable in general and not such a hot dealer of weed, nothing like ol’ Hector the Spanish guy at ChiBoom’s in Plattsburgh say, but later I came to view him as one of the best, actually the best I’d ever known.

  Anyhow up at the Mothership that night while I was sitting alone on the cot in the laundryroom making up my escape plans I’d suddenly remembered this one guy named Captain Ave from Key West, Florida originally who ran this charter boat called Belinda Blue out of Mobay and was a regular customer of I-Man’s. Belinda Blue was a short fat commercial fishing boat from Maine or someplace that he’d like converted for taking people on two-week-long charter cruises to the various islands, families mostly and honeymooning couples and suchlike who’d thought when they signed on that a boat named Belinda Blue that they had to fly down to meet in Montego Bay, Jamaica would turn out to be one of those sleek three-masted schooners like you see in magazines. I think maybe Captain Ave misled them too, with pictures of other guys’ boats and had gotten in trouble doing the same thing in the States and that was the real reason why he worked out of Montego Bay instead of Miami or Key West.

  The point is Captain Ave who was a decent enough guy himself usually had seriously pissed-off customers who thought they’d been cheated and like anyone they took it out on the crew who on these kind of boats have to be like the servants. Which meant he had a hard time keeping his crew and was always looking for new guys. That was the word around the marina at least, and Captain Ave himself once when me and I-Man dropped off a couple ounces told me he always needed an extra hand and if I ever felt like doing a little island-hopping I should look him up. He asked me did I have any experience and I said sure, I’d spent a lot of time on the frigid waters of Lake Champlain which I admitted wasn’t exactly the Atlantic Ocean but they had a lot of big boats and ferries and so on there and I could crew, sure.

  Okay, anytime, kid, he said. I think he sensed I was pretty good at bullshitting white people which was something he definitely needed on the Belinda Blue. But back then I was still newly arrived in Jamaica and was employed full time at the ant farm as I-Man’s apprentice and was totally turned off by the idea of serving food and cocktails at sunset and doing laundry for rich white Americans too pissed off to lighten up because they’d expected to be cruising the warm romantic waters of the Caribbean on a white-sailed windjammer instead of a fat wallowing old tub which was pretty comfortable actually and cool the way Captai
n Ave’d fixed it up with bunks and a galley and all, even two staterooms, he called them.

  Now though everything was different. I was nobody’s apprentice now. When I finally got down off the hill and stepped off the bus from Montpelier in front of the marina it was dark and I was hoping the gate hadn’t been locked yet, and it hadn’t. And when I ran through the open gate into the marina and made my way down the crisscrossing docks where all the boats were tied up I was hoping I’d see the Belinda Blue where it used to be, I was hoping hoping hoping, and it was. All I had to hope for then was that Captain Ave’d need another guy to crew for him and that the Belinda Blue was set to go out real soon, before Jason or any of his coworkers or even Doc found out where I’d gone. On an island like Jamaica you can hide all right from the rest of the world but you can’t hide from the people who live there.

  Captain Ave was loading cases of beer and soft drinks aboard by himself and when I walked up and asked did he need any help he said, Yeah, stash this shit below and c’mon aboard, kid, and we’ll talk. Which I did and a little while later we were sitting in the stern doing business. It turned out that a husband and wife and their two little kids were flying in from New York City tomorrow to take the Belinda Blue to this island called Dominica where they’d rented a house for a few weeks, sort of a month-long surf-and-turf family vacation that this phony New York rental agent Captain Ave knew had cooked up for them. Nobody at the marina wanted to crew for Captain Ave as usual and for the usual reasons, I knew although he didn’t say that, but also because it was a one-way cruise with no guaranteed return trip.