Rule of the Bone (31 page)

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.

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 Captain 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.

The husband was supposed to be this famous singer from the sixties who'd kicked drugs and booze and got married and had kids et cetera and become like a regular citizen but I wasn't even born until 1979 so I'd never heard of him. Captain Ave thought that was weird but he was a sixties guy. The beers I'd been lugging below were for Captain Ave and his crew, he said because the cruise was supposed to be drug and alcohol free. He was pretty disgusted by the whole thing. Plus he'd just found out the whole family were vegetarians which he said he didn't know from Unitarians. Can you handle that? he asked me and I said sure, I'll cook Ital. He said fine so long as he didn't have to eat that shit. Then we agreed I'd get two hundred bucks when we got to Dominica and we shook hands.

We each drank a beer over it and afterwards he showed me where the crew bunked. It was way up in the bow of the boat and tiny like a pointed coffin with no window and two foot-wide benches with sponge rubber mattresses for sleeping on. I was glad then that I was the only member of the crew and decided that unless it rained I'd be sleeping up on the topdeck anyhow and proceeded to haul one of the chunks of sponge rubber up there and lay down on it and probably due to the excitement of the last few days plus relief for having found a way out of Jamaica I didn't have any thoughts left and almost instantly fell asleep.

There's only one other thing that happened to me in Jamaica worth telling about. Not because it's so interesting but it's kind of sad. In the morning Captain Ave who had to go meet the singer and his family at the airport gave me a bunch of money and dropped me off at the Mobay market to buy enough veggies to get us to Dominica. Get about a week's worth, he said, and bring me the change plus receipts. No problema, I said although I wasn't too happy about making any public appearances so to speak especially at the marketplace where I'd stand out and certain people I knew did their food shopping. Still, Captain Ave didn't know about my various adventures and I couldn't tell him so I did what he asked and went around to the different stands buying breadfruits and akee and calalu and coconuts and various fruits, the usual components of an Ital menu which was basically all I knew how to cook anyhow. Him and me he said could eat the fish we caught and there'd be several islands we'd stop at along the way where we could get regular American food which was fine by me since I hadn't had any in a long time.

I was pretty close to finished and was buying this huge bag of oranges from a lady when I looked up and spotted a white person in the crowd on the other side of the market and even though I hadn't seen him since the Ridgeways' I recognized him at once. It was Russ. He looked the same at first except I could tell he was really confused and scared especially by all the black people whose native language he probably couldn't understand a word of. For a minute there I had to fight off a desire to rush over and help him but I quickly overcame it and ducked down behind the fat lady selling the oranges and peeked out under her table at him. Russ's eyes were darting around and he was licking his lips a lot and kept pushing his hair off his forehead. He was trying to seem cool. He had on a sleeveless shirt and cutoffs and black high-top Doc Martens and no socks and he'd cut his hair with a buzz on the sides and a rattail in back. I noticed then that he had a bunch more tattoos, all over his arms and legs even, all kinds of snakes and different-colored dragons and various slogans. They were pretty much everywhere. He looked really pathetic and I wished we could still be friends but it was definitely too late.

His eyes were like cruising the marketplace crowd, for me no doubt since I hadn't been at the clock tower where I'd promised but then I saw he'd locked onto something and I followed his gaze across the crowd to a group of three whites, females they were, Evening Star and her campers Rita and Dickie. Evening Star being the experienced Jamaican shopper and all was pointing to this and that and explaining everything to the other two who were like nodding and being politely amazed. Russ though was already zeroing in on them like a teenaged heat-seeking missile. I really had to fight with myself to keep from standing up and waving my arms and hollering, Russ! Don't, Russ! Come with me to Dominica, Russ!

But it was too late even for that. Evening Star'd picked him out of the crowd and was already smiling in his direction and he was smiling back and I knew was rehearsing in his mind the line he'd use. He'd say like, You guys come here often? and she'd say, Every Saturday, darlin', and he'd say, Wow, you must live here, I'm new in town, just arrived from the States and looking for my homey named Chappie who was s'posed to meet me blah blah blah, and the rest would be as predictable as the first part.

I watched for a few minutes more while Russ and Evening Star yakked it up. Then she introduced him to her friends from Boston and turned aside and said something private to Russ which was probably that her friends were lesbians and which knowing Russ would turn him on and knowing Evening Star that was the point of telling him. Anyhow a second later he was carrying their groceries for them and talking like they were all old friends and I figured it wouldn't take more than another few minutes for Evening Star to realize that Chappie, Russ's homey from upstate New York was the very boy she'd known as Bone. And in an hour Russ'd have a blunt-sized spliff in his mouth and be doing the backstroke in the pool at Starport.

They strolled toward the parking lot and I finally stood up and watched them get into Evening Star's Range Rover and drive off. Poor ol' Russ, I thought. I wished I could've saved him. But I knew that even if I'd tried he wouldn't've let me. That could've been me, I thought, that poor bewildered kid in the Doc Martens and the rat-tail haircut with the painful-looking red and blue and black newly drilled tattoos all over his pink skin climbing into the fancy car and riding up the hill to the greathouse, a stoner boy amazed at his incredible luck and looking forward already to getting coked with some weird dude named Doc on the patio before the sun goes down and laid by this buff older chick named Evening Star in the laundryroom before it comes up again.

It
would've
been me, if it hadn't been for Sister Rose and I-Man and everything I'd learned about myself and life from coming to love them out there at the schoolbus in Plattsburgh and being with I-Man afterwards at the ant farm and up on the groundation in Accompong. I'd even loved big bad Bruce because he'd died trying to save me from the fire in Au Sable and that'd taught me a lot too. They were the only three people I'd chosen on my own to love, and they were gone. But still, that morning in Mobay when I saw Russ for the last time, I saw clearly for the first time that loving Sister Rose and I-Man and even Bruce had left me with riches that I could draw on for the rest of my life, and I was totally grateful to them.

We cast off from the marina at around four that afternoon and headed in bright sunshine and a light breeze for open water. From the galley I could look out onto the foredeck while I was working and watch the kids Josh and Rachel who were supposed to be twins but they didn't look anything alike and I wondered if they were adopted because neither of them resembled the parents either. Josh was moon-faced and blond and freckled and Rachel was dark and curly-haired and wore glasses and was taller than her brother. They were maybe eight or nine, spoiled rich kids I suppose but basically decent and surprisingly considerate to each other, considering they didn't get much out of their parents one way or the other.

I remember the singer and his wife lying in their perfect bodies on the foredeck on these plastic chaise longues getting tanned and zoned and not saying anything which was their style even to each other. They were like in the middle of a ten-year fight and they didn't know if you were going to come in on his side or hers so they weren't talking till you declared yourself. No smiles, no jokes, no questions, except like where's the bathroom and so on. They weren't unpolite, just into themselves a lot and each of them into blaming the other whenever something went wrong. Like already their whole vacation'd gone wrong on account of the
Belinda Blue
not being a clipper ship but instead of just making the best of it they seemed to prefer giving each other dirty looks and ignoring the rest of us, including their own kids.