Rule of the Bone (25 page)

Down below. In the flower gardens, I said.

He wanted to know exactly so I said I wasn't sure, maybe near the statues of all the lambs and foxes and so on. Next to the big birdbath, I told him which happened to be down near the gate and as far from the house as you could get without going onto the road. What're you gonna do? I asked.

Well, Bone, I'm going to have to kill him.

Jeez. How come?

Why? Because what's mine is mine. That's the rule I live by, Bone. And when some little nigger comes into my house and takes what's mine, he has to pay. He has to pay and pay, many times over. And the only thing that nigger owns is his worthless life, so that's what he'll have to pay with.

Jeez, I said. That's pretty harsh. He got up from his chair real slow and creaky and I said, I thought this was Evening Star's house.

She's
mine, Bone. So whatever she owns I own too. He walked into his bedroom then and came back out a few seconds later and when he got close to the door the moonlight glinted off the gun in his hand and his face which was gray and cold as ice. Down by the birdbath you say?

Yeah. I was really freaking now and wishing like mad that I'd never said anything but it was too late. Listen, Pa, I think I'll stay up here if you don't mind, I said.

Up to you, Bone. I can understand that, he said and he stepped outside and in a flash I took off for the kitchen and the laundryroom in back. When I got there I-Man was buckling his pants up and Evening Star was gone.

Bone! he says only mildly surprised to see me like he didn't know yet that I'd walked in on him and Evening Star. Wussup, mon? he said and strolled into the kitchen like he'd just taken a piss outside and planned to check out the fridge for a late-night snack.

Listen, you gotta get outa here, man. Doc's after your ass, I said. He didn't seem to register, just lifted his eyebrows and pursed his lips, then reached for the handle to the fridge.

He's got a gun, I said. That got his attention.

Serious t'ing? Where him at?

Down in front by the birdbath, I said. He's fucking deadly cold, man. And he's got his piece.

Why Doc wan' t' kill I-and-I, Bone?

For screwing Evening Star, for Christ's sake! Why d'ya think? Hurry the fuck up and book by the back way, I told him. There were some old paths crisscrossing through the bush there that the local people used instead of the road when they came over the hill on foot.

He nodded and walked slowly to the door to the backyard and then stopped and turned to me. How Doc come to understand dat I-and-I jukin' Evenin' Star?

Yeah, well, I dunno about that. Maybe she told him. Maybe he like saw you himself. He was right here at the time, man, sitting out in the livingroom twenty feet away and even though he was coked to the gills his senses were alert, man. He might've even heard you.

Fe trut', Bone?

Yeah, the truth. Now get the fuck outa here, man. For Christ's sake, book it, willya?

You comin', Bone?

Where? Not back to the ant farm, man. That's the first place he'll look for you.

Not de ant farm. I-and-I goin' to Jah-kingdom. Up into de Cockpit, Bone, where I-and-I mus' sattar 'mongst mi Maroon brethren-dem and be I-lion in I-kingdom, mon. Time come, time go, time fly away, Bone, but I-and-I mus' return to Cockpit Country. Mus' return I-self to de mos' fruitful land of I-birth, de home of all de African I-scendants in Babylon. De Babylonians-dem cyan't come in dere 'mongst de Maroons. You comin'? he asked again. Or you stayin' on de dis a-yere plantation wi' Papa Doc?

You think I shouldn't?

Up to you, Bone. But I-and-I headin' fe de Cockpit now. I didn't know what the Cockpit was exactly unless it was the little village in the boonies he'd talked about back in the schoolbus when he was homesick and all which if it was I had a pretty good mental picture of the place and at that moment it seemed to have a lot of advantages over the Mothership especially since I wasn't as interested as before in like turning into Baby Doc so I said, Yeah. Yeah, I'm comin'. Lemme get my stuff first and I'll meet you out back.

He said Irie and took up his Jah-stick and stepped outside into the moonlit backyard while I ran upstairs to my room where I tossed my old stuffed bird and the classical CDs which I still hadn't listened to and my few articles of clothing into my backpack. I was headed back down the hall toward the stairs when I looked over the railing and down and saw Pa with his gun in his hand walk through the door into the livingroom where he stood in a patch of moonlight and sniffed and looked around like he was a snake planning his next move. Just then the door to his and Evening Star's bedroom opened and she came out into the moonlit livingroom all naked and the two of them faced each other with me up above in the darkness looking down.

C'mon, Doc, she said in a low patient voice like she was calling in one of her dogs. C'mon in to bed now. Party's over.

Bone saw you and the nigger, he said.

She sighed like she was real tired and said, Yeah. I know.

I'll have to kill him, you understand. Or have him killed.

Not tonight, darlin'. C'mon in now.

Then he said like she looked pretty good standing there naked in the moonlight and she laughs and says he looks good too because of the gun in his hand which turns her on, and they start walking slowly toward each other with him already unbuckling his belt with his free hand so I take this opportunity to tiptoe back to my room at the far end of the hall. I went straight to the one window and opened it and crawled out onto the roof of the laundryroom and with my backpack on I swung out and went hand over hand along the overhanging branch of this big breadfruit tree back there and then shinnied down the trunk to the ground where I-Man stood watching in the shadows.

Ready, Bone? he said.

Lead on, man. Babylon's behind us now, I said and he made his little chuckling laugh and turned and led me into the bush.

It was late the next afternoon before we finally got up to Accompong in the Cockpit Country which turned out to be like I'd thought, I-Man's hometown that he'd been so homesick for back in the States. It took about four different rides to hitch in because Accompong is a long ways from Mobay and not many people go there so we had to spend a lot of time just chilling by the side of these winding country roads and rode sometimes in the back of pickups and had to walk the last four or five miles uphill from the main road in to the village. When we got there it was sort of the way I'd pictured, basically a single dirt street with grass growing in the middle and a dozen or so cabins and small houses and a few more you could see scattered around in the jungle and all these little veggie gardens and banana trees and kids running around in underpants and old guys snoozing in the shade of a breadfruit tree and goats and the occasional pig and females carrying baskets of yams on their heads or plastic pails of water from the well.

One reason they call it Cockpit Country must be on account of the way the land looks. For miles and miles around as far as you can see they have like these huge deep craters or pits where the ground dropped out way back in ancient times and they're all covered with trees and vines and thornbushes and so on and the people who live up in the Cockpit are more like ridge runners than they are mountain climbers and don't like to go down into the craters unless they have to for a lost goat or kid or to hide out from the cops or their other enemies. Due to the hundreds of caves down in the pits and the thickness of the bush hiding out is basically what people have been doing up there for like hundreds of years, I-Man explained to me. The people who live there are called Maroons, he said because of the reddish tint to their skin which the truth is I couldn't see, they all looked like regular black people to me only darker. But they're all descended from these incredibly tough Africans who were called Ashantis and after they were captured in Africa and shipped over to Jamaica they escaped into the bush the first chance they had and then kicked ass when the white slavecatchers came after them until finally the slavecatchers said fuck it and went back to their sugar plantations on the coast and just let the Maroons live out there on their own and said don't send us any more of those Ashanti warrior types and that's when the Queen of England signed a peace treaty with the head Maroon whose name was Cudjoe.

Nowadays though the place was full of ganja growers and miscellaneous criminals who were raised here and went to the city and fucked up and came back plus some regular Jamaican farmers and suchlike but they still pretty much lived like their Maroon ancestors and didn't have electricity or running water or TV or cars or any of the other modern conveniences. Also a lot of Rastas had their groundations up there in the Cockpit and I-Man said the real reason it's named Cockpit is because it's always been the place where the Rastafarian ascendants of the old African Ashanti warriors sattar fe control de universe.

All the way up from Mobay throughout the long night after we'd made our escape from Papa Doc and the greathouse and while we chilled by the side of the road out of Mobay waiting for a ride I-Man was really into teaching me this stuff about the Maroons and Accompong and the old Ashanti warriors, like he'd decided I was ready now to learn these things and use them in my daily life even though I was still a white kid from America. But I was feeling weird and guilty from when I told Pa about how I-Man'd hooked up with Evening Star which was why we were on the run in the first place and I-Man wasn't making it any easier by treating me like his favorite student or something.

I hadn't figured out yet why I'd done it and I couldn't ask I-Man the way I usually did when I couldn't figure something out so I was slipping into blaming white people generally and saying to myself I must've done it because of my background in lying and betrayal that I'd learned as a child from my stepfather and other adults who all happened to be white. I-Man'd be running on about the old Ashantis and the slavecatchers and how they'd hunted the Ashantis down with these humongous man-eating dogs from Panama and I'd be thinking, Fucking Babylon, man, white people really suck, you can never trust them, et cetera, like that was letting me off the hook for almost getting I-Man killed by my own father.

There were maybe a few hundred people living in the village of Accompong and a few hundred more living in the surrounding area and everybody said they were Maroons and were related to everybody else or that's how it seemed anyhow and I guess it was true because you couldn't be one without being the other, so the Maroons were like a tribe, you could say. They owned all the land in the Cockpit together and shared it on account of the treaty their great-grandfathers'd signed with the Queen of England more or less like the Mohawks at home and other American Indians. Except the Maroons didn't call the Cockpit a reservation, it was more like an independent country called Accompong inhabited and ruled exclusively by the Maroons, at least the way they talked about it it was. They had a chief and everything and even a secretary of state who were these really old guys that I saw a couple of times from a distance but never got to talk to because I-Man right after we got there set me up out in the bush far from the village where he had his groundation and that's pretty much where I stayed.

He didn't exactly say it but I-Man was protecting me I think by having me sattar way out in the Cockpit a couple of miles from the village basically to watch over his ganja patch which was pretty sizable, hundreds of plants that I was also supposed to water from this spring way down in the bottom of the pit. But having white strangers or any kind of outsider camped in the village was definitely not encouraged or at least that's the feeling I got from I-Man because when we first got there and he introduced me to a few people like the woman he said was his kids' mother, not his wife I noticed or one of his cousins hanging in his yard he'd say Bone jus' be passin' through. Plus with his kids and all he didn't have any room for me in his cabin. They only had two little rooms where everybody slept, all the kids on one bed and I-Man and the kids' mother on another and the rest of the time everybody hung in the yard where they cooked under a thatched roof on poles and sat around on little stools and an old car seat.

Where I was was wicked cool though. Out there in the Cockpit up on a ridge with panoramic views and a cleared slope in front with these terraces where the ganja grew I had my own cabin made out of bamboo with a thatched roof and a hammock for sleeping in and a stone fireplace for cooking and the necessary pots and other utensils and lots of food around like breadfruit and yams and akee and coconuts and calalu plus stuff I-Man brought out from the village that his old lady made. It was the best squat I'd ever had. I was happy and besides I think I needed it, being alone way out there with plenty of time to like think and remember things except when in the evenings mostly I-Man'd come out with a couple of his Rasta cousins and they'd sit around and meditate over a chillum and do some African-style drumming on these excellent homemade drums and put out deep reflection until dawn some nights. Mainly I'd hang back and watch and listen because these were wicked heavy dudes who talked about killing guys down in Kingston and Mobay and except for I-Man they weren't too interested in me and probably just thought I was some American white kid who was into weed that I-Man was using as a watchdog.

Which was basically true. I was a regular herb boy then and I did work for I-Man who'd spent one whole day teaching me how to blow through a conch shell like a horn in case somebody tried to steal his crop. But there were other things in life that interested me even more than weed and watchdogging I-Man's crop and I-Man knew that so lots of times he'd come out to the groundation alone or with one of his pick'nies he called them, his kids of which he had four and after he'd checked his plants and talked to them awhile and done some weeding and nipping the buds and shown me some new tricks of the ganja grower's trade and so on he'd sattar in the yard by the cabin and Rasta-rap his way through another chapter in the history of the African captivity in Babylon.

By this time my hair was pretty long, down to my shoulders and in my eyes and I had this nervous habit when I was thinking of twirling it with my fingers and one day in the middle of telling me about how Marcus Garvey'd been poisoned by the capitalists for trying to take the Africans back to the promised land in their own ark I-Man noticed me doing it and got up and went into the bush and came back with a bunch of leaves that he crushed and squeezed some juice out of and said to rub it into my locks. The juice smelled like licorice but it worked because the next day when I woke up I had regular dreadlocks growing, not big time but these loose springy dark reddish-brown locks about a foot long that I couldn't really check out since I didn't have a mirror but I could feel them and could tell they were cool-looking. Also I'd only been wearing shorts out there on the groundation and no shirt and had gotten real tanned so this one day I was standing alone dribbling water from a pail onto the plants like I-Man'd showed me and I flipped my head to chase off a mosquito and saw dreadlocks swirling through the air in my shadow. Then I looked down at my arms and hands which were like coffee-colored and when I saw I didn't look like a regular white kid anymore I put down the bucket and did a little Rasta dance right there in the sunshine.

It's funny how when you change the way you look on the outside even if it's only with a tattoo you feel different on the inside. I was learning that it's true what I-Man'd said, if you work at it long enough and are serious you
can
become a brand-new beggar which is like if you're a carpenter you go to the worksite and discover all new material to work with so you can change your plans and start building yourself a bigger and a better house to live in. I'd even started talking different, not saying cool and excellent to everything anymore but instead I'd go Irie, mon, and when I used to refer to myself only as I or me now I said I-and-I which makes you feel slightly separate from your body, it makes you feel that your true self is like this spirit that can float through the air where it communes with the universe and it can even travel backward and forward in time.

All the drumming and long meditation and all the late-night reflection sessions with the Maroons and their Ashanti ascendants who were with us in spirit like I-Man said and the detailed instruction in history and daily life I was getting from I-Man plus the regular partaking of the sacrament of kali at the chillum with the Rastas and the everyday solitary exploration of I-self I'd been doing with the assistance of excellent weed ever since the first day I met I-Man at the schoolbus in Plattsburgh, all this'd been having a deep gradual effect on me without my actually knowing it, until one morning I woke up in my hammock and looked up at the thatched roof overhead and I knew I'd like finally cast off my old self and was lying naked in the universe as the day I was born fifteen years ago in Au Sable, New York, United States of America, Planet Earth.

Then on the night of the full moon when the ganja plants were taller than my head and were supposed to be harvested the next day I-Man and three of his Rasta brethren from Accompong came out to the groundation all serious and carrying machetes, and when they told me they were taking me to the secret Maroon cave fe see in de true lights of I-self, I was ready, man. I was fucking ready. In the old days I probably would've said cool or whatever and maybe tried to postpone the whole thing without them knowing I was scared but now I just said, Dat be irie, and followed I-Man in the moonlight straight into the bush with the brethren coming along behind and no one talking.

It wasn't like I wanted to be made into an honorary Negro or anything. The truth is I really believed in wisdom then, that there actually was such a thing, I mean and a few people had it, like I-Man mainly and under the right conditions they could pass it on even to a kid and I believed, with my background and being a white American and all I especially needed some wisdom if I was going to grow up and be better at living my life than most of the adults I'd known so far were.

We didn't seem to be walking on a regular path and sometimes I-Man had to hack the macca bushes away before we could pass through one cockpit and climb over the ridge and descend into another but I guess we were on some kind of known path because I-Man didn't hesitate any or change his mind about this way or that. We walked for hours it seemed like, up steep inclines in zigzags and then down again until I started feeling like I was on a whole other continent than the one I'd lived on all my life, like I was in Africa and I was a little nervous because I knew they had these wild pigs out here that people said were dangerous and I was glad the brethren and I-Man were carrying machetes.

I knew the brethren pretty good by then, Terron and Elroy and Rubber who were in their thirties or forties, older Rastas with wicked massy dreads. Terron and Elroy were I-Man's cousins and like junior partners in his groundation and Rubber whose name came from his face which he could twist into all these different expressions anytime he wanted but mostly looked sad was his nephew and had his own groundation in the cockpit next to I-Man's. They were heavy dudes, darker and fiercer than the ant farm posse, expert machete men with great builds who looked like they could pull your arms out if they wanted. I-Man who was a tiny old guy compared to them they treated with total respect and Terron once told me that someday I-Man when he ascended unto the fullness of his age and completed his trampoosing among the various peoples of the world would probably become the chief of the Maroons in Accompong or at least the secretary of state.

Finally we were way down in the bottom of one of the cockpits where the moonlight couldn't reach and you couldn't even see the stars and I was just following I-Man in pitch darkness by the sound of his footsteps now. Then suddenly I couldn't hear him anymore so I stopped and after a few seconds I said, Yo, I-Man, where you at?