Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

I’ll be going with you, I said. Only as far as Burlington on the Vermont side of the lake though, where the airport for international flights is. I’ll wave you off, man. I’ve never done that before.

Excellent, he said copying me which was his cool way of thanking me again for the money although giving it up hadn’t exactly been a big sacrifice on my part. I was actually glad to get rid of it. But I was already missing I-Man more than I’d ever missed my own mom even or my real lather and when I went back to my mattress and blew out the candle I cried to myself like a little kid as quiet as I could although I knew I-Man could hear me. But he was the type of person who was wise and kind enough to just let me cry and not embarrass me by trying to make me feel okay about everything which is one of the reasons I loved him and so I did until just before dawn as the sky was starting to turn gray over Vermont in the east where in a few hours we would be going on the ferry, I finally fell asleep.

The next day was bright and warm, a good day for traveling at least for I-Man it was and I ran around behind him trying to catch up with his pleasure while he bopped through the bus packing his stuff into a blue plastic flight bag and walked me one last time through his garden and gave me final instructions on how to harvest and dry his ganja crop and take care of the vegetables although I pretty much by then knew how to run the plantation on my own.

At one point he got sad for a few minutes I think mainly on account of not being able to see all his crops come to their fullness as he put it and he took a few leaves off of each ganja plant like for souvenirs and nestled them inside his red and gold and green tam among his coiled dreadlocks.

He wanted to leave his boom box and the reggae tapes that he’d got from Jah Mood with me as a sort of present but I could tell he really wanted to take them home with him so I said forget it, man, I won’t have any trouble replacing them and you probably will so he raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips like he does and dumped the tapes into his flight bag. Then after a breakfast of refried Ital beans and hot sauce and leftover roasted dreadnuts and chicory tea we sat on the steps of the old schoolbus and smoked a spliff together and finally took off for the ferry dock downtown.

I’d packed a few things into my backpack myself, clothes and my stuffed bird and so on, personal items in case I ran into an opportunity to explore the state of Vermont a little although I wasn’t actually thinking too much about my future just then, it was too scary and lonely to contemplate any possible futures without the company and teachings of I-Man to guide me so I was just going to float awhile on an hour-to-hour basis and see what developed.

When I mentioned that to I-Man he said I was on my way to being a brand-new beggar and gave me this warm smile. No plans, no regrets, he said. Praise an’ thanks mus’ be sufficient unto ev’ry day.

I said yeah but it’d be hard to do that the rest of my life. Making plans and having regrets, man, they’re like second nature to me.

Y’ first nature, dat be what you got to come to, mon, he explained and I made a mental note to remember his words which I was doing to just about everything he said that morning since I never expected to see him or hear from him again. I didn’t think I-Man’d be much of a letter writer.

He was carrying his box which was pretty big— it was like this humongous quadraphonic the size of a regular suitcase— on one shoulder and his flight bag slung over the other and in his free hand he lugged his Jah-stick which was this incredible long snake with the head of a dreadlocked lion at the top that he’d been carving all summer while we sat around the bus at night exchanging views. The Jah-stick was about a foot taller than he was and made him look like this old African prophet or something which I guess is what he had in mind because he didn’t really need it for anything else.

When we got down to the ferry dock and there were other people waiting around who were like staring at us I saw I-Man for the first time in months the way he must look to straight people who aren’t used to seeing even regular black people let alone African prophets and I realized that he sure was one weird-looking little dude and I probably was myself although not as weird-looking as him because I was only a white kid. But I was wearing my doo-rag and we both had like these baggy surfer cutoffs on and our old faded orange Come Back To Jamaica tee shirts and our homemade sandals and a bunch of hand-woven bracelets that I-Man’d showed me how to make out of the hemp we’d found growing wild in the ditch at the end of the field one day.

We were cool though and I liked how people’d flick us with their eyes and then when they thought we weren’t paying any attention they’d elbow each other and stare and I was wishing I had a couple more tattoos like maybe a Rasta lion or Jah Lives or a green ganja leaf to flash with. I was thinking I’d get some after I-Man was gone, like for helping me to remember these days when they were long gone. The crossed bones on the inside of my forearm even though it was the source of my name seemed kind of cold and harsh to me and too connected to my past life back when I was with Russ and before I’d met I-Man to make it known to people that I was now in the process of becoming a brand-new beggar. The bones was like Mister Yesterday’s tattoo but that was okay I guess, at wasn’t like I’d lost my memory or anything.

In about twenty minutes the ferry came and I-Man bought the tickets peeling the bills off of Buster’s roll like he was an experienced big-time spender. I was surprised by how huge the boat was, a triple-decker luxury ocean liner, the Love Boat practically bringing a load of tourists and their cars over from Vermont twenty-five miles away and taking another load back. They were mostly families on vacation in stationwagons piled high with folding chairs and ice chests and grills, fatback suburbanites with sunburns and their fatback kids who looked sick of having to enjoy their parents’ idea of a good time. There were some sporty young couples too though who drove aboard in Audis and Beemers and Volvos and suchlike and groups of college kid types in their parents’ cars and some overweight middleaged bikers in shiny new leathers out on a cruise, the Mild Ones Bruce used to call them who rode Jap shit with sidecars, plus a few pickups and RVs and a small number of people who walked on board like us. Most of them though were exercise freaks with money and tans, slim people in J. Crew shorts and tee shirts printed with fortune-cookie political advice carefully wheeling their ten-speed bikes aboard like greyhounds, plus a bunch of whole-earth hikers with beards and ponytails and high-tech backpacks and huge suede tractor-tire shoes looking righteous and environmentally safe all over like they’d been recycled in a previous life.

More than before like at the mall and so on I really felt out of it here. I felt different from everyone else like I was watching a science show on the Discovery channel, Life Styles of the Mindless Wusses or something and anyhow after all these weeks of being crashed at the schoolbus and all I wasn’t used to mixing with so many people, especially straight people and it made me nervous and a little paranoid so I said to I-Man who actually looked like he was enjoying himself watching the wusses and being watched back, Let’s go up on top and check the scenic splendor, man.

He smiled and said excellent and up the stairs we went ahead of the others and got good seats on the top deck way in the front of the ship where I-Man as soon as we sat down pulled his stash out of his flight bag and rolled a fat spliff and lit up like we were back home at the plantation and all alone.