Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Which I did. It took a while and sometimes I got the chills again and then I’d sweat for hours especially at night and I was so weak I could barely sit up and had to piss in a jar and so on. But I-Man knew all these old African and Rastafarian cures from herbs and other plants he could find in the field and out among the shady woods behind Sun Foods and downtown in the park by the lake that he’d go out for at night and bring back and mash up and boil into like a tea that he actually spoonfed to me for quite a few days, and every morning I woke up feeling a little bit better until pretty soon we were having regular conversations like before. I-Man still had a lot of Rasta wisdom to impart and I still had a lot to learn about life in general and about the spirit of truth and goodness, as I’d discovered from trying to go back home again so I just tried to relax and listen and watch.

The reggae tunes were from some tapes and a box, a cool Sony probably stolen that had been given to I-Man by a local kid he called Jah Mood but I knew he was only Randy Moody who was heavy into reggae and dope and had grown these matted white-kid imitation dreadlocks that he thought were cool and they sort of were if you didn’t know about the real thing. Randy though was too dumb to know the difference between black people and white people or too racist to admit there was a difference and he was stuck forever being a white kid from Plattsburgh.

When I mentioned that one morning to I-Man he smiled and patted my hand and said Jah Mood will come lo I-self in Jah’s own time and way and not to worry, Bone, him na gwan displace m’ heart. That’s when I decided I’d better do more listening and less talking.

Nobody knew we were crashed at the schoolbus, not even Jah Mood. After the Bong Brothers’d been busted the place had bad vibes locally and kids’d stayed away and the cops forgot about it I guess. I-Man’s ganja crop’d started coming in by then so he was even more careful of the cops than before when he was only an illegal alien and he didn’t leave the place during the daytime now except when he absolutely had to which was almost never, not even to Sun Foods now that his vegetables were ripe and he didn’t tell any civilians he knew, mostly mall rats and other homeless kids where he lived or who he lived with or where he had his plantation. His ganja plants were from seeds he’d sneaked in with him from Jamaica, he said and he’d started them in old egg cartons in the bus. Then he’d slipped them in among the weeds around the field and he’d cropped them off when they were young so they grew in low and broad and you wouldn’t even know they were there unless he pointed them out to you. They were genius plants and I-Man was like this mad scientist when it came to growing and processing herb so we ended up blowing pure lamb’s breath, all we wanted and probably the best dope in the whole northcountry that summer. Maybe in America.

It’s funny, when you have all the quality dope you want and no stress about getting more you find out pretty fast what you need and you never smoke more than that. With I-Man once the crop came in I never went into deep buster-freak mode like I used to. I’d just hit a J in the morning after breakfast and chill around sunset with another so I could talk with I-Man I-to-I so to speak. In the old days me and Russ’d cop some weed from Hector or someplace and scoop up some malt 40s and go bust our brains with bongs and brews until we ran out or passed out whichever came first and we’d never learn anything from the experience about ourselves or the world. Now my head was like permanently located halfway between being bummed from no dope and unconscious from too much, only it was like my true self that I’d locked onto there, the self that hadn’t been fucked up by my childhood and all and the self that wasn’t completely whacked in reaction. I-Man said I was coming up to my lights, de Bone him coming to know I-self an’ placin him on de way to natty. He said I was taking my first baby steps along the path of truth and righteousness which would soon lead me out of Babylon and I said, Excellent, man, that is truly excellent, and he laughed.

Then this one night late in July after my health had been completely restored and in fact I was stronger than I’d ever been on account of I-Man’s roots and herbs and the Ital vegetarian diet and all and from working on the plantation in the summer sun, I woke up a few hours after I’d fallen asleep and heard this strange slow tune from I-Man’s box being played real low back in the rear of the bus. That was where I-Man slept and kept his personal stuff. My crib was in the front near the driver’s seat and we used the middle space for socializing and making things or just hanging out on rainy days. Anyhow I woke up to the sad slow sound of this old song Many Rivers to Cross which is about life in Jamaica and Jimmy Cliff sings it although it’s not a reggae song, it’s more like a regular black American religious song about slavery and patience and getting over to heaven and suchlike.

I got up and went back to his crib just because of this strange strong feeling I had that I-Man was sending me a message with the song, and he was because as soon as I sat down on the bus seat next to his mattress his voice came out of the darkness all gloomy and slow and weary. Bone, Bone, Bone, he said. I-and-I got too many rivers to cross.

He needed to get home to Jamaica, he explained. He needed to return to the forests and the mountain streams and the deep blue Caribbean Sea to live among his brethren again. It was the first time I’d heard him talk about Jamaica as a real place and not Babylon, with real people living there, people he loved and missed and I could fully understand that and felt sorry for him. Which was a whole new feeling for me and scared me a little but I quickly overcame my fear and started asking him questions like where in Jamaica he was from and what was it like there and did he have a wife or kids or anything.

He was from this village called Accompong way up in the hills, he said which was this independent nation of Ashanti warriors who’d like escaped from slavery and had beaten the British in a war in the olden days, in the 1900s I think. He told me he had a small plantation up there in Accompong and listed everything that grew on it, breadfruit and afoo yams and coconut and calalu and akee and banana, his groundation he called it, and he had a woman up there and some kids too, four or five, he said which sounded funny due to its vagueness but by now I was used to I-Man being vague about things Americans are real exact about and then turning around and being incredibly exact about stuff that Americans are vague about like history and religion which to him were as personal as his teeth and hair.

He spoke real slow and his voice was sadder than I’d ever heard him and I thought I was going to cry without even knowing for what but I kind of knew what was coming. I got up and went down to my end of the schoolbus where my pack was and got my old stuffed bird, the woodcock and took Buster’s roll of bills out of it. I didn’t know how much was there, I’d never bothered to count it probably because I felt guilty for stealing it even off of someone as evil as Buster. It was dirty money made from kiddie porn probably or worse although Buster’d claimed he’d gotten it from producing rap concerts which I’d never believed so I’d kind of decided not to spend it except in ways that were completely clean like buying Sister Rose’s bus ticket. I lit a candle there by my mattress and counted it out, seven hundred and forty bucks which was a lot more than I’d figured.

Then I went back to where I-Man was still playing his Jimmy Cliff tape. It’s the sound track of this famous Jamaican movie The Harder They Come actually which I never saw but I heard it was incredible. I put my candle down on the floor and handed him the money, all seven hundred and forty bucks of it. He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips which was how he always said thanks for any favor, small or big and folded the bills without counting them and put them in the pocket of his shorts. He said, Heartical, Bone. Then he smiled and said he’d be going to sleep now, he’d have to rest I-self for the long trampoose home was how he put it and I said sure, me too.