Rule of the Bone (12 page)

We'll get the fuck outa here together, I told her. You just be cool and leave everything to me, man. I know a place we can hide till I find out where your real home is. Maybe you got parents.

Then Buster was back with the Big Macs and all, yackety-yakking about this and that like we were great lifelong buddies, me and him and Froggy, and these rapsters the Hooliganz from Albany or Troy or wherever were out to rip all three of us off and not just him and not him being out to rip them off either. Buster took this thumb-sized roll of bills, mostly fifties it looked like and tucked it into my hand and said to stash it deep inside my pack where no one would think to look.

There wasn't anyplace like that in my pack, I told him because there actually wasn't and plus I didn't want him or anyone else to see my gun which is how I now regarded the niner I'd taken from the Ridgeways',
my
gun. But hey, I got this stuffed bird, I said and pulled the ol' woodcock out of the garbage bag. And it's all hollow inside. I can stick the money inside the bird, I said to Buster and did it, just shoved the roll of bills up what would have been its asshole if it hadn't been turned into this neat little pouch-like interior that I had already examined long ago to no avail for drugs. See, I said to him and then I put the CDs and the ol' woodcock into the backpack but on top of everything else right out there in plain sight.

Genius, pure genius! he said and he leaned back in his seat and took a nap for a while as it slowly got dark and cars started pulling into the lot and after a while the place was rocking pretty good and there were pickups and motorcycles and all kinds of cars coming and going. Buster was wide awake now and watching every car that pulled in but still no black rapsters from Troy, just white people, locals it looked like, big guys with mustaches and shaggy hair and thick necks and some females in tight jeans and cowboy boots and the occasional biker when speak of the devil there they were, the men of Adirondack Iron, at least a few of them, Joker and Roundhouse and Raoul and Packer, all four riding their own Harleys this time.

Naturally I didn't say anything to Buster about them, I just slid down low in my seat so they couldn't see me even by accident as they walked right past the van and went inside Chi-Boom's. It wasn't bad enough I had to deal with Buster Brown the psycho porn king, now I had to worry about the men of Adirondack Iron too. Those guys I definitely did not want to see me even from a distance.

And then pretty soon after that Buster's rapsters finally arrived, four black dudes in a rusted-out '79 Galaxie, big guys wearing doo-rags on their heads and Chicago Bulls sweats and hoodies and Filo sneaks looking straight out of the projects only there aren't any projects within a hundred miles of here so they really looked like they were men from another planet like Pod Boy except Pod Boy was traveling incognito tonight and the Hooliganz definitely weren't.

Buster jumped out and ran around and greeted them with all these high fives and get-down street talk which is almost embarrassing for a fellow white person to have to witness with his own eyes and ears and the first thing they do is ask him for the money.

They talked for a few minutes out there and I could pick up most of it. The rapsters wanted Buster to hand over the expense money up front or they wouldn't sign and he was saying he couldn't get it from the promoters until after they signed the contract blah blah but he does have a couple of motel rooms for them, he says and he'll spring for food until they all get paid after the concert and so on.

The rapsters know Buster is lying and why, but they don't know exactly
where
he's lying which is his forte so to speak. The biggest Hooligan was wearing sunglasses and looked bad enough to rip Buster's brains right down through the roof of his mouth. He draped one of his arms the size of a tire around Buster's slopy shoulders and very pissed he says, Man, we be needin a drink and you be buyin cause they ain't no other
fuckin
way for us to get a muthafuckin drink, you know what I'm sayin. Let's us go inside an talk this whole muthafuckin mess over, he says and as requested Buster like a good boy scoots along into Chi-Boom's with them leaving me and Froggy alone in the van with various things but most important with the money.

C'mon, man, let's get the fuck outa here! I said and grabbed her by the hand and yanked. But she pulled her hand out of mine and didn't seem to want to leave. What's the matter, Froggy, don't you want to get rid of this guy? He's a creep, for chrissake.

He's gonna be mad, she says in this tiny voice, practically the first time I've heard it and I think maybe she's only about six or seven, even younger than I thought. I'm s'posed to stay here an' wait for him to come back, she says.

C'mon, man. This is our only chance, the rapsters've got him scared, I said and reached for her hand again but she pulled away and shrank back against the side of the van. I climbed around the seat and got in back with her and she scrunched herself up like she was afraid of me. Aw c'mon, Froggy, I ain't gonna hurt you. All I wanna do is help you out a little, help you get away from this creep and maybe find a regular family to live with. Maybe even find your own mom and dad. You got a regular mom and dad someplace? I asked her. Actually I was starting to wonder if anyone had a regular mother and father anymore except on television.

She said yes.

Whereabouts are they?

I don't know. At home, I guess.

Where's home then?

I don't know. Far. Milwaukee, she said.

Jeez, that's far. How the hell'd you get mixed up with Buster Brown? He your uncle or something?

No, she said. He was somebody her mom knew and her mom had given her to him.

Gave
you to him?

I guess. Yeah. She couldn't take care of me anymore, and my daddy was gone someplace. In jail.

Jeez. Didn't she even maybe
sell you
to him? I mean, it ain't like Buster is fucking Doctor Spock or some kind of child care expert. If you give your kid over to a guy like him you want to get
paid
for it, you know?

She said yeah he must've paid her mom something which to me made more sense especially if her mom was cracked out and maybe had AIDS or something and really needed the cash and couldn't take care of her kid anymore. I'd heard a few stories of mothers doing that and while it didn't exactly cheer me up about family life it at least made sense. But it also meant I was going to have a hard time getting Froggy situated with a regular family and all, assuming I could even convince her to run out on Buster in the first place. Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you don't expect it and the people who deserve loyalty the least seem to get it the most especially when it's coming from little kids.

Look, we gotta get the fuck outa here before Buster makes peace with the rapsters and comes back and wants his money. This is our one chance. I know this great place where we can chill for a while, it's an actual schoolbus only it's been turned into like a housetrailer where you can live in it. I told her then that if she didn't like it better there with me than here being Buster's prisoner she could come back to him or she could even go home to Milwaukee if she wanted, I'd buy her a bus ticket with some of Buster's money. You know it's illegal to buy and sell little kids, I told her. So it's okay for you to cut out on him and go wherever the hell you want. This's America and America's a free country, Froggy. Even for kids.

I think I pretty nearly had her convinced when all of a sudden I heard this crash and a few feet in front of the van the window of the bar comes down like when I shot up the Ridgeways' picture window and a bottle comes flying out and then a couple of people come flying out too, one white and one black and the white guy is Joker and the black guy is a rapster, not the huge guy but one of the smaller ones, and then there's Buster in the middle of it trying to pull Joker off of the rapster when Packer comes out and coldconks Buster on the head with a beer bottle and then there's Roundhouse and Raoul hollering racist stuff like kill the fucking nigger which of course brings on the rest of the Hooliganz who whale into the bikers like this is the most fun they've had all month, beating the shit out of a bunch of white asshole bikers from the northcountry. Buster is down on the ground all bloody and getting tromped on by both sides and the lead Hooligan is smacking Joker around like he's a carpet and the other Hooliganz're fending for themselves pretty good against a rapidly growing gang of white guys from inside the bar who normally wouldn't take the side of bikers except when the white race gets into it.

Now suddenly it's like we've got a full-scale race riot going on in the parking lot of Chi-Boom's and I figure the cops'1l be next to join the fray and are probably already on their way over from Dunkin' Donuts or wherever. C'mon, girl, let's us be invisible, I said to Froggy and I opened the side door of the van and grabbed her by her wrist and with my other hand hefted my backpack which actually weighed more than Froggy and dragged her out of the van and around behind it. Then we were running side by side, she was really into it with me now, the two of us scuttling along between the cars until we were out there on Bridge Street and ducking down Margaret Street toward an alley I knew and there came the cops only they didn't see us.

Half an hour later we're at the secret hole Russ'd shown me in the chain link fence by the field out behind the warehouses. I held the fence back while Froggy slipped under and then I followed and took her hand and led her across that creepy windblown dark field toward the old wrecked schoolbus in the high grass in the middle. When we got there it looked the same, no signs of life but it didn't stink so bad all around as before. I knocked on the door a couple times and waited and did it again but no answer.

I guess the ol' Bong Brothers got busted or else they split, I said and pulled the door open and looked inside. Nothing. No one. Looks like we're home, I said and went inside and set my pack down. Froggy followed and stood there by the driver's seat examining the place which wasn't all that bad although it probably helped that it was dark and all we could see were the outlines of the few bus seats that had been left and the mattresses and the old boards on cinderblocks.

What d'ya think? I said.

It's dark.

I remembered the flashlight in my pack then and when I had it turned on we checked the place out carefully and saw that the Bong Brothers seemed to've cleaned all their stuff out and left just the furniture so to speak and from the smell nobody'd been here for a month or more. It smelled clean and dry like it had been aired out and I noticed that some of the cardboard that'd covered the windows'd been taken down and a few of the windows were open. I walked down the length of the bus toward the rear shining my flashlight into the corners and behind the seats and so on until I got to the end where I shined it across the back seat and I saw a body lying there.

I didn't say anything because of not wanting to scare Froggy who was behind me a ways and I let the light go slowly up the guy's legs—it was a guy, I could see that much, wearing Wal-Mart sneaks and jeans—on to his hands which were on his belly and I saw then that he was a black guy with a plaid flannel shirt on but no wounds or sign of blood so far and then I came to his face and there he was, lying on his back and smiling up at me like he'd just overheard me telling Froggy this funny joke, gray eyes crinkly and open in the middle of a broad coffee-colored face with a humongous flat nose and deep lines almost like trenches around his wide mouth and over his eyebrows and a huge mass of dreadlocks wrapped all around his head like a pillow of blacksnakes.

He puckered his lips and said, Would y' mine shinin down de torch, mon. I-Man cyan see nuttin wid de light shinin in him eyes so.

Cool, I said and dropped the beam of my light.

Mon got to shine de light from
out
him eyes fe seein good, he said and he laughed from way down deep in his chest.

Racially this was getting to be quite an unusual night for me. I hadn't seen this many black people on the same night in my whole life practically and these weren't your usual black people either like Bart the security guard at the mall and the occasional Air Force dude you saw around town. These guys were seriously black, like Africans almost.

What're you doing here, man? I said keeping my light pointed down like he'd asked.

Same as you, mon.

What's that?

Tryin to get home, mon. Me jus' tryin to get home.

Yeah, well, I guess us too, I said. Then I introduced myself and Froggy and he said his name was I-Man and shook my hand like a regular white person so as to make me feel normal which it did. Afterwards me and Froggy settled on one of the mattresses and I covered her with my jacket and she fell straight to sleep. I was lying there thinking about all that'd happened when suddenly I smelled the sweet familiar aroma of burning marijuana and I-Man calls down from his seat in the back, You wan' smoke some spliff, mon?

I said sure and went back there and we smoked and talked a while and before the night was gone I knew that I had met the man who would become my best friend.

It's hard to think back to those days of living in the bus with I-Man and Froggy and not get all gummed up with feelings of like thankfulness although I don't know who to thank and didn't know then either since I-Man himself never took any credit and everything that seemed unusual to me was only normal to him.

Maybe it
was
normal and maybe what was unusual or weird was basically my life up to then. Because up to then for me living was the same as running through hell with a gasoline suit on.

You got to give thanks and praise, mon, he used to tell me whenever I'd say how cool things were now with me and Froggy and him living together in the schoolbus out there in the field behind the warehouses north of Plattsburgh.

I'd say, Yeah, right, who'm I supposed to give thanks and praise to? and I-Man always smiled that soft smile of his and said Jah which I guessed was his idea of God or maybe Jesus but different on account of I-Man being an old black guy and a Jamaican and all that. I wasn't sure who Jah was really, the whole thing being still pretty new to me and when he told about how Jah was actually this African king of kings named Haile Selassie who drove the whites out of Africa and freed up his people I figured this was something white people probably couldn't get or else I-Man was working from a different Bible than ours, one I hadn't heard of yet.

Actually there were some Rastafarians who were like white Americans that I'd seen at the mall and elsewhere hitching et cetera, kids mainly who were into reefer but wanted a religion to go with it so they grew their hair out and twisted it into locks and put wax and other crap into it so they could make like dreadlocks out of it and these white Rastas when they talked about Jah and said give praise and thanks, mon, stuff they'd picked up mostly from Bob Marley songs they never mentioned the Haile Selassie guy. I knew they were in reality talking about God though and Jesus and suchlike only picturing Him as a way older black guy like Malcolm X with a gray beard so they could picture themselves as black too, like that was the whole point, to not have to be an American white kid worshiping the god of your parents which is why the Haile Selassie stuff got overlooked by them but it was important.

The thing is, reality, at least that part of reality which includes gods and saviors and so forth was different for I-Man than it was for us American white kids. Probably different even than for American black kids too but I can't say much about that of course since I'm not one myself. I mean, who knows how black kids from America picture God? I guess if you judge from their parents' artworks and church songs and suchlike it figures that they picture Him pretty much the same as white kids do only He's a little less uptight maybe.

Anyhow whenever I-Man told me to give thanks and praise to Jah because I'd just said how cool everything was it was like he was telling me to thank the monkey god or praise the hundred-armed god with the elephant face or something weird like that. But when I thought about it since for the first time in my life I was actually happy it made more sense for me to be thanking and praising foreign gods like that than the bearded white American Methodist God and His skinny son Jesus that my mom and stepfather and my grandmother'd told me to thank and praise in church when I was a little kid. I would've been lying then since I didn't exactly have a lot to be thankful for unless you count my real father taking off on me and my stepfather's sicko visits to my room when he was drunk and my mom's weepy dumb belief that everything was cool and my grandmother's constant complaining. Giving thanks and praise to God and Jesus back then, that would've been the really weird thing and they probably knew it too. Then or now they themselves never went to church regular anyhow, not even one Sunday a month but only often enough so people knew they weren't Catholic or Jew which I think was the main point.

It's funny about religion, whether it's the religion of white Rasta kids or even my own mom it's usually got some other point than thanks and praise. For the people doing the thanking and praising, I mean. I'd actually never thought much about this stuff until I met up with I-Man that summer and then for a while before I realized it I really got into it and started making up some ground-breaking new opinions for myself. In religion I-Man was different than anyone else I'd ever met, he was actually sincerely religious I guess you could say but religious in the way that God or Jesus or whoever must've had in mind back in the olden days like in Israel when they first started thinking religion might be a pretty good idea for earth people since earth people were so selfish and ignorant and all and went around acting like they were going to live forever and deserved it too.

For I-Man religion was mainly a way to give thanks and praise just for being alive because nobody exactly
deserved
life. It wasn't like you could go out and earn it somehow. Plus for him religion was a way to straighten out his diet and in general get his act together due to the fact that true Rastafarians weren't allowed to eat any pork or lobsters or any of what he called deaders which meant meat basically and no salt on anything on account of Africans being allergic to salt he told me. And they didn't allow alcoholic beverages either, he said due to the connection between rum and slavery days, a connection I didn't quite get till later. Anyhow everything had to be natural, he said which was one reason why he'd run away from the farm camp, because of the unnatural food they had to eat there and because of all the insecticides they put on the apple trees was the second reason he'd split.

He'd come up from Jamaica in April with a crew of migrant farmworkers and the hiring guy hadn't told him in advance that he wouldn't be able to practice his religion here in spite of America being a free country because of how the food in America was all full of deaders and salt and chemicals. So I-Man'd just walked. The deal was they were supposed to work on the apple trees in the spring and then in June the same crew was supposed to go to Florida on a bus and cut sugarcane all summer for a different company and come back north in the fall and pick apples. Once you signed on you couldn't quit until six months were up without losing all the money that you'd earned so far and your work permit so if you left the camp you were like an international outlaw, an illegal alien plus you were broke.

I said I was an outlaw too and Bone wasn't my real name and I-Man said every honest man was an oulaw and every free man if he didn't want to carry a slavery name had to choose a new one. He wouldn't tell me his slavery name, he said he couldn't actually say it anymore and I didn't tell him mine either, the same as my stepfather's. Although I did say I used to have two names, Chappie and something else but now I only had one, Bone. He thought that was cool.

He was definitely the most interesting guy I had met in my life so far. I dug his dreadlocks, these long thick black whips about forty or fifty of them that hung down almost to his waist which actually wasn't as long as it seems because he was pretty short for an adult, my height but very muscular especially for an old guy who I think was around fifty. The dreadlocks were only two and a half feet long or so but probably if you straightened them out they would've reached all the way to the ground because his hair was springy and like coiled the way black people's hair is naturally and he'd never cut it since he'd come to his lights, he said which was when he first came to know I self. That's how he talked. Rastas weren't supposed to cut their hair, he told me or shave either which wasn't a problem for him since he almost didn't have any more hair growing on his face than I did which was basically none. I thought he might be part Chinese on account of some of his looks but when I asked him once he said no, one hundred percent pure African blood.

Of great interest to me naturally was the fact that like it was a commandment from the old African king of kings himself all good Rastafarians were required to smoke ganja pretty much on a daily basis. They smoked it in order to ascend to the heights and penetrate to the depths was how I-Man put it when what I think he meant was just getting high. Getting high was like a religious experience for him which was cool but from the way he talked about it religion was also a way to be free of control by white people, English people mainly who he said had taken his ascendants out of Africa and made slaves of them in Jamaica and many other places. Then later on when the English found out how colonization was a cheaper and less vexatious way than slavery for getting rich without having to leave London except on vacation, they went and freed all their slaves and colonized them instead. And after that when the English queen finally died and they had to let Jamaica go free the Americans and Canadians invented tourism which was the same as colonization, he said only without the citizens of the colony needing to make or grow anything.

I liked his words, ascendants and vexatious and so on which made the subject of history interesting to me for the first time, and considering it was a religion Rastafarianism made a lot of sense too, at least the way I-Man explained it.

I didn't think a white boy could get into it without fakery like the kids wearing dreads I'd seen around but he said sure if you smoked enough ganja you could because once you got to the depths of understanding and came to know I-self you'd see that everything and everyone was the same I-and-I. One love, he said. One heart. One I.

I told him I wasn't really into going that far yet but maybe when I was older and had put travel to foreign lands and sex and eating meat and some other important experiences behind me I'd be willing to check out the depths of understanding where everything and everyone was the same. For now though I was still into differences.

That first night when me and Froggy showed up at the schoolbus the reason it smelled so good was because I-Man had turned the bus into like a greenhouse. I couldn't know it until the next morning of course because it was dark when we got there and I was high for the first time in a while and a little confused by everything that had happened but the first thing I saw when I woke up was the sunlight streaming in through the windows and then I saw all these incredible plants in cans and jars and wooden tubs and old barrels. They were set all over the bus wherever the sun could hit them, on boards and bus seats and plastic boxes and hanging from the ceiling by wires, even on the driver's seat up front and the dashboard and it was like I was waking up in this beautiful tropical garden instead of what used to be a crack den and before that a regular schoolbus.

I sat up on the mattress and studied the place. The plants were mostly young and not too leafy yet but they looked real heathy and green, all kinds of vegetables growing, some of which I could recognize myself like corn and tomatoes and others that I-Man had to tell me later like potatoes and peas and string beans and cabbages and yams and chili peppers and this Jamaican stuff called calalu but it looked like spinach and even carrots and some cucumbers and squashes. Naturally he was into growing weed. I didn't have any trouble recognizing that even though the plants were only a few inches high. You smoke enough skunk you develop a sense for spotting it, like you turn into one of those drug dogs they use. When you water it or after it rains the smell enters the air and you can pick it up from a long ways off like lilacs or roses and that first morning when I woke up I inhaled and knew it was the smell of freshly watered cannabis. I-Man had all these small pieces of hose and tubing connected to each other and running into the pots and jars and on to the next ones with water dribbling at the connectors and out of these tiny holes he'd poked in the hosing and you could hear the drip-drip-drips and the light breeze coming through the windows and the new leaves brushing each other and with the smell of fresh green marijuana in the air it was a nice way to wake up. A super-nice way. It was like the Garden of Eden.

I noticed that the hose came into the bus through the window by the steering wheel and when I stood up and looked out I saw that it led back across the grassy field and there was I-Man in floppy green shorts and yellow tee shirt way in the distance by one of the old cinderblock warehouses where I figured there was a water spigot he'd tapped into. Then I looked around for Froggy but didn't see her anywhere. I yelled, Hey, Froggy, where are you, man? No answer so I'm thinking she must've gotten scared when she woke up and found herself in this weird garden with a little old black dude who talked funny and as soon as he left to turn on the water she must've sneaked out and gone back to find Buster although I sure hoped not. I didn't want him or anyone else finding out where I was presently located and also I kind of felt Froggy was my personal responsibility now and with I Man's help I might get her situated with some real parents instead of a guy who maybe he did manage rap groups and run a religious organization but as far as I was concerned he was still the psycho porn king of Plattsburgh who kept kids on junk.

Then I looked out the window again and saw I-Man coming across the field toward the bus and beside him is Froggy holding his hand like she was his kid. As they get closer I can see that he's talking to her a mile a minute and pointing out the different kinds of weeds and grasses and flowers, teaching her things it looks like, probably the first time anybody'd taught her anything good in her life.

They made a real nice picture, the two of them and it made me think of that book
Uncle Tom's Cabin
which I got from the library and read in seventh grade for a book report but my teacher was wicked pissed at me for saying it was pretty good considering a white woman wrote it and gave me a D. My teacher was a white woman herself and thought I was being disrespectful but I wasn't. I just knew it would've been different if it'd been written by a black man, say or even a black woman and it would've been better too because the old guy Uncle Tom would've kicked some serious ass and then he'd've probably been lynched or something but it almost would've been worth it. In those old slavery days white people were
really
fucked up was what I meant in my book report and the white lady who wrote it was trying not to be, that's all. Of course white people are still fucked up, no surprises there but sometimes I forget like with the book report.