Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

  Sometime after midnight I guess it was I-Man stood up and said time to light the torches and led us out into the field where there were these sticks in the ground with dried palm leaves tied around the top. By the time he’d lit the first one I heard the plane that he must’ve heard earlier so we started running from one torch to the other lighting them real fast. When they were all going I saw they made like a rectangle of lights and pretty soon the plane buzzed past and cut a wide turn and came back the other way a few hundred feet from the ground just over the trees and then dropped down at the edge of the field and skidded across it and came to a stop at the end right next to where we’d stacked the ganja bales.

  It went real fast then. The plane was like one of those old-fashioned two-engine jobs you see on the late movie and Nighthawk who was a fat white guy in a muscle shirt and Bermuda shorts and high-tops jumps out by the side door carrying an Uzi, the first I’d ever seen up close and says for us in American to hurry the fuck up, I’m running late, like he’s got a dentist appointment. Me and the posse go right to work then loading the bales while I-Man and Nighthawk stand off to one side watching and smoking cigarettes and talking business I guess, but then as I’m passing by them with a bale on my head I hear Nighthawk say, Who’s the white kid?

  I pass my bale to Terron who’s doing the stacking inside and go back and hear I-Man say, Baby Doc, and the guy says, No shit? Doc’s got a white kid? and I keep going because we’re like in a line and Rubber’s practically stepping on my heels and grab another bale and come back. This time they’re arguing a little, I-Man and Nighthawk who says, I don’t give a fuck what you thought.

  Next time I go by Nighthawk’s saying, Don’t sweat it, man, it’ll be there tomorrow, next day at the latest. I-Man’s pissed, I can tell, he’s got that dark pulled-down face on with pursed lips and his arms crossed on his chest and a few seconds later he pulls away from Nighthawk and starts helping us finish the loading.

  The second we’re done Nighthawk without saying goodbye or thanks or anything takes his Uzi and climbs inside his plane, closes the door and cranks up his engines and while we’re running off the field he turns the plane and aims it back the way he came in. It rumbles across the little field looking like a pregnant pigeon or something, real slow and heavy and I’m wondering if it can even take off with that load but at the end of the field it turns and comes back toward us again going faster and faster and then it’s off the ground and zooms over our heads just clearing the palm trees behind us and in a few seconds it’s gone and in a few more you couldn’t even hear it.

  What happened was the guy who was supposed to give Nighthawk the money for I-Man had come in from the States late and got hung up in customs in Mobay or something so Nighthawk had to fly out to the Cockpit without the money and without even his own pay, he said. But because the deal’d already been made for delivery of the ganja in Haiti the next day and couldn’t be postponed or the whole thing’d come apart Nighthawk had agreed to go ahead as planned and get paid when he got back from Haiti and I-Man’d have to do the same.

  I guess this kind of fuck-up happened a lot because once Nighthawk was gone I-Man didn’t seem pissed anymore and the next morning he came out to my cabin and said for me to come with him to Mobay fe sattar at the ant farm which I figured meant I was going to get a share of the profits just like the rest of the posse. This was excellent because I hadn’t had any honest money of my own for a long time. Since back when I was dealing weed to Bruce and the Adirondack Iron. Plus it was tourist season now and I-Man wanted me to follow up on my old idea of me dealing to the white party animals in the hotels who were too scared of black people to buy ganja from them. I’d thought he’d forgotten all about that but like he said, Everyt’ing in him season, Bone. Everyt’ing in him time.

  We hooked a ride with a beer truck and got down to Mobay and out to the ant farm by late afternoon and chilled that night in one of the inner chambers with Prince Shabba who said the rest of the posse was playing in a reggae band downtown at Doctors Cave which is this famous beach and general hangout for rich white people and a good place for dealing small-load herb. It was a mellow night, just me and Shabba and I-Man listening to tapes on I-Man’s box and smoking from the stash and talking Rasta and the next morning I left the ant farm early to check out the scene at the Holiday Inn and some of the other hotels where the package tourists like from Indiana and other places in the Midwest go.

  Mainly I was on a research mission to see how hard it’d be to hang out by the pools and the bars and beachfronts which were off limits except to hotel guests and talk to people. And like I thought, it turned out real easy for me on account of being white to stroll pretty much wherever I wanted to and I talked to quite a few party animals of all different ages and interests and pretty soon had more orders for ganja than I could keep in my head and had to cop a pencil and paper from one of the waiters at the Casa Montego to make notes. It wasn’t much, a quarter ounce here, a half there but it added up fast and I was psyched.

  By around three in the afternoon I’m headed back to the ant farm to get the goods so I can make my deliveries before party time and I’m really stoked because this is the first time I’ve been able to do a job for I-Man and the posse that nobody else can do even though it’s only on account of the color of my skin. The ant farm is located a few miles out beyond Rose Hall off the Falmouth Road and when I come up on the path that leads down through the bushes to it I see this same dark brown Benz parked by the side of the road that’d blown by me awhile ago right after I’d given up hitching and decided to walk the rest of the way in. Anyhow I’m thinking, Cool, this is the money guy from the States as promised so I bop on down but when I get there nobody’s around. At least not out in the yard in front of the entrance where I’d expected them to be. Just I-Man’s box playing a Black Uhuru tape real slow like the batteries are low again and his Jah-stick lying on the ground.

  I pushed open the main door and walked into the first room, past the picture gallery of Martin Luther King and the other heroes and into the next, and so on through several more chambers but nobody’s there and I can’t hear anybody talking. Weird, I’m thinking but I was curious to see how a deal like this goes down in case I ever got the chance to do one myself someday so I kept on wandering through the many inter-connected chambers of the ant farm expecting every time I turned a corner to see I-Man being handed a leather briefcase full of crisp new American bills like on TV.

  It’s sort of like a video game maze back in there and you can wander around in circles for days but once you’re used to it from living there like I was you pretty much know where you are all the time and can generally remember the way out in spite of there being no windows, even though all you can remember exactly is the last room you were in before this one and all you can predict is the next room off of it. Anyhow I’m standing in the middle of one of the center rooms where we sometimes gathered fe deal wi’ de chillum and some mellow drumming when I hear a lot of movement on the other side of the bamboo wall and then the curtain is brushed away and in walks Nighthawk with his Uzi and right behind him is Jason who I remember from the Mothership and he’s got a gun too, a short-nosed blue niner and right behind Jason is a white guy in a safari jacket I’ve never seen before.

  They’re looking real pissed all three and in a wicked rush. Nighthawk grabs me by the shoulder and says, How the fuck d’we get outa here, kid! and the white guy who I guess is the American with the money says, Jesus, who’s this? and that’s the moment when I realized that something terrible’d happened.

  Jason looks at me like he doesn’t recognize who I am but Nighthawk says, Doc’s kid the Rasta told me.

  The white guy in the safari jacket goes, Doc’s kid? Doc doesn’t have any white kid, for Christ’s sake. The fucking Rasta’s fulla shit.

  No, I seen him last night, Nighthawk says. He was workin’ for the Rasta.

  The American guy says, Well, get the little bastard to tell us how to get the fuck outa he
re and do him. And hurry the fuck up, he says and steps back like he doesn’t want to get any of my blood on his jacket.

  Nighthawk shoved me back against the wall and I banged off of it and fell down and when I looked up he was standing over me with the barrel of his Uzi staring me in the eye. C’mon, kid, where’s the fucking exit?

  I said to go out the door behind me and keep bearing left which was approximately correct and as close as I could say anyhow. I can lead you out better than tell you though, I said.

  Just then Jason put his face down by me and said, Bone? Dat really you wid all dem dreadlocks, mon?

  I go, Yeah. Wussup, Jason.

  He smiles and turns to the American and tells him I’m Doc’s kid all right and I used to live with Doc up on the hill but I ran off with the Rasta last summer.

  Fuck! the American says.

  Then Nighthawk says, We shouldn’t do a white kid anyhow, man. No matter whose kid he is. Too much trouble, especially since he’s American. The tourist board’ll go nuts.

  Yeah, fine. The fucking tourist board. Look, do what you want. I don’t actually give a shit one way or the other, the whole fuckin’ island’s a fuckin’ monkey house. I’m outa here tonight anyhow.

  He moves for the exit and then to me he says, Kid, if you’re smart you’ll go back to Doc’s house and you’ll stay put there till you grow up. If you was one of Doc’s black kids you’d be dead meat by now. I don’t give a shit myself. Next time you might not be so lucky.

  I go, Thanks for the advice, man, and he shook his head like he’d gotten real sick of me fast and disappeared into the next chamber. Nighthawk lowered his Uzi and followed him. When Jason got to the door he turned back and said, See you up on de hill, mon, and gave me a toothy smile that actually looked friendly and was gone.

  After I couldn’t hear the American and Nighthawk and Jason anymore and figured by now they’d found their way out I stood up and brushed myself off. I pretty much knew by then what I was going to find but I went looking for it anyhow. I headed for the rooms way at the back where I myself would’ve run if three guys like these’d showed up with guns and no plans to pay me for my services. In one of the rooms when I pushed the curtain away I saw poor old Prince Shabba lying facedown in a pool of blood with a bunch of holes in his back where the Uzi’d really ripped him up.

  I stepped around his body and went into the next room and there against the far wall was I-Man sitting on the sandy floor all slumped over with his skinny little legs sticking out and his eyes and mouth open. His face was empty inside though. I-Man was gone, flown off to Africa. There was a jagged hole in the center of his forehead and a whole lot of blood running down the bamboo wall behind his head into the sand. Oh man, it was a horrible sight. Especially that single dark blue bullet hole which I could see had been put there by Jason’s niner.

  You can understand if I just keep talking here, okay?

  I didn’t know what to do then. I wasn’t scared or anything although I probably should’ve been. All I wanted was to get out of there, to get as far from the ant farm as I could, so I could think about everything and try to make sense of my feelings and thoughts which at that moment were the most mixed up they had ever been in my life. Somehow the whole terrible thing felt like it was my fault and there was no way left for me now to make it right.

  When I got back out to the yard I-Man’s box was sitting on the ground finally silent and dead as ol’ I-Man himself. I picked it up and put it on my shoulder and took up I-Man’s Jah-stick and walked back up the path to the road where the Benz’d been parked and started hiking in the direction of Mobay. It didn’t make me feel any better to think of I-Man as flown off to Africa. Actually when it came right down to it, like now, I didn’t believe any of that shit.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  BONE PHONES HOME

  When you’re in a country full of black people and you’re a white kid and don’t want to stick out the best thing is to go hang where the white folks gather. Which in my case was Doctors Cave in Mobay, this private beach club with a bunch of fancy shops and restaurants in the neighborhood and white people all over the place strolling hand in hand and buying things and getting suntanned and feeling safe from attack or deception by the natives. Plus since I didn’t have any ganja to sell now it was an excellent place to spare-change a few bucks while I figured out what to do next.

  That first night I crashed in the back seat of an unlocked Volvo I found in the lot behind the Beach View Hotel on Gloucester Avenue and the next morning after I’d successfully scored for change a few times despite my dreads with my story about being left behind by my teenaged Christian tour group I was sitting on a bench eating a meat patty for breakfast and reading a copy of the Daily Gleaner I’d found in a trashcan, and over on the second page I saw a little article stuck in the middle of all these other articles about shootings and machete choppings and suchlike about two unidentified men found shot dead in Mount Zion. That’s the name of the town the ant farm was in so I knew it was about Prince Shabba and I-Man. Like no way I was going to go to the cops and identify their bodies, but I did think I ought to hitch out to Accompong maybe and tell I-Man’s old lady and Rubber and the guys what had happened, so that’s what I did.

  I was all burdened down by guilt feelings then, partly on account of not being able to help I-Man at the moment when he most needed me although I don’t know what I could’ve done to distract those dudes so he could get away. Still I might’ve thought of something. I’m a pretty good talker especially when it comes to bullshitting white people. That was the other thing that had me all twisted up. Whiteness. Even more than being Doc’s son it was my white skin that’d saved me from being blown away like Prince Shabba and I-Man. I knew if I wasn’t white, if I’d been a real Rasta-boy like I’d been pretending to be I’d be dead now.

  When I got out to Accompong that afternoon though, right away I saw it was a mistake. They didn’t need me to bring the news. I probably should’ve realized it but everybody already knew what’d happened at the ant farm— Jamaica’s a really small country and news travels fast even without telephones especially when it concerns somebody as well known on the ganja circuit as I-Man. Anyhow I went to I-Man’s old lady first but she wouldn’t even talk to me. I’d never actually learned her name, I-Man’d only called her his ‘oman and introducing people to each other by name wasn’t his style exactly but I was ashamed I’d never even asked. She was a short stocky lady with a hard face and when I knocked on the door to her and I-Man’s cabin she came to the door with a little pick’ny-kid on her hip and when she saw who it was she just waved me away like I was a fly and closed the door in my face.

  Everybody else in the village, the guys hanging out at the general store and the bar and the kids who used to be real friendly all just turned away when they saw me coming or watched me from a distance with cold dark faces. It was grim. Finally I went out to I-Man’s groundation where I found Rubber watering the baby plants by himself but even he didn’t want to see me or talk about what had happened. I tried a couple of times to act friendly like before and introduced the subject by saying stuff like, You heard about I-Man I guess, but he just nodded and went on with his work like I wasn’t there. It looked like he was taking control of I-Man’s plants and didn’t want me around to help him or even witness it.

  People weren’t like making physical threats against me or anything but for the first time it felt dangerous up there amongst the Maroons and I figured it’d be best if I got out of there before dark so I went up to my old cabin and got my backpack and my belongings. While I was there I saw my old machete leaning in a corner that I-Man’d given me and taught me how to use for all the different tasks. I’d used it as a plow and a shovel and a hoe and an ax and a gigantic jackknife and a sword all in one, and I thought, man, I’ve earned that at least, so I took the machete and the sharpening file too. I didn’t say goodbye or anything to Rubber, just walked off toward the village and then down the long slope to the main road.


  When I got out to the road I set my pack down and IMan’s box and leaned my Jah-stick against them to start hitching but for a while there weren’t any vehicles coming so I checked out my machete and started sharpening it with the file. Pretty soon it was like razor sharp and I tried that old hair test where you pull out a hair and slice it in half and then all of a sudden I’m sawing off all my dreadlocks one by one. It only took a minute and they were gone, lying at my feet like a pile of dead snakes. I leaned down and scooped them up in my hands and carried them back into the bushes a ways and laid them gently on the ground there and patted them like saying goodbye to a sweet friend or a pet you have to abandon. Then I came back to the road where my stuff was and continued hitching and the third car that passed stopped and picked me up. It was a Baptist minister, a fat black guy sweating in a suit and tie who drove me all the way in to Mobay singing hymns in this deep loud voice and dropped me off right in front of Doctors Cave.

  That night I couldn’t find any unlocked cars behind the hotels along the Gloucester Avenue strip and finally real late I sneaked onto the St. James Hospital grounds which’re like a park with a fence around it and camped under some bushes near the fence so I could climb back over and hit the street real quick if I had to. For a while I lay there with my head on my backpack for a pillow thinking about my troubles and how much I was missing I-Man already and what a little turd I was for trying not to be white when all the time I’d been enjoying many of the benefits of the white race, like still being alive for instance. I thought no wonder the Maroons were pissed at me, they probably figured I’d helped set the whole thing up and was working for Nighthawk and was only coming back to Accompong to try and rip them off a second time.