Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

I was getting my picture of I-Man slightly revised you might say. I’d even seen some guns by now, Prince Shabba had one, a.45 I think and so did I-Man which he kept in his old flight bag that he took with him everywhere and of course the flashing machetes which these guys treated real casual like they were Swiss Army knives or something. Plus quite a lot of money was being passed around including to and from cops. One night the same potbellied dude who’d let me and I-Man walk through customs at the airport without checking came by the ant farm and left with a free pound of primo boom loaded with buds like he’d phoned in his order ahead. And there were the same cool dudes with their flies open as I’d noticed at the airport who came around every few days for a load and I pictured their customers the Miller-timers rolling joints in their hotel rooms getting too choked to think and paranoid and all and I almost felt sorry for them.

I-Man and Prince Shabba and Fattis came and went from the ant farm a lot, making home deliveries I guess or bill collecting and whenever I-Man left the premises he took his blue bag and his Jah-stick and looked like a priest going on a pilgrimage. He was cool and I was proud to be under his protection which is basically how people treated me. Mostly though I did chores like sweeping the yard every day and lugging water with Buju from this spigot pipe up by the road where a lot of other Jamaicans came for their water with plastic buckets and pans, women and little half-naked kids and some wicked good-looking teenaged girls who I didn’t dare talk to or anything so me and Buju’d chat while our buckets filled about how he was going to Miami soon to work cutting cane or New York and pick apples like I-Man’d done and buy stuff. Not, I figured. He was like into video cameras and VCRs and big-screen TVs and so on that he wouldn’t’ve been able to even use at the ant farm on account of there being no electricity but he thought everything ran on batteries.

He wasn’t much older than me and on the dim side but friendly and he had a good singing voice and knew all the reggae songs from I-Man’s box but I still couldn’t understand the words so I didn’t talk much, I mainly listened. I think except for I-Man they thought I was on the dim side myself, especially for a white American kid but it doesn’t hurt for people to think you’re not as bright as you are when you don’t know all the rules yet.

Then this one afternoon Prince Shabba was gone off to Kingston or someplace and Fattis was asleep and Buju was making mugs out of bamboo for drinking and I-Man wanted to head out fe deal wi’ de brethren so he said for me to come along too. Come see de sights of Jamaica, Bone.

Cool, I said and off we went through the bushes to the road where we caught a bus crammed full of regular Jamaicans and rode about five or six miles into Mobay which is their word for Montego Bay, this fairly big town the size of Plattsburgh only a lot more crowded. I didn’t know for sure how long I’d been at the ant farm, two or three weeks maybe but a long time so when I started seeing white people like you do here and there on the streets of Mobay or in cars they really stood out and looked like extra-terrestrials with their chalky skin and long narrow noses and scrappy hair and I kept checking them out like I wasn’t one myself on account of how weird they looked, even the quick jerky way they walked and how they waved their hands but not their arms when they talked and how they didn’t get right up in each other’s face and all when they met like I was used to by now but stood back a ways and talked from a distance.

The streets were hot and crowded and muddy from a morning shower and where we got off the bus there were ten or twenty more buses unloading crowds of people with big burlap-wrapped bags of stuff, vegetables and fruits and even animals like chickens and pigs and goats and I saw that we were at this huge outdoor marketplace jammed with tables all loaded up with different kinds of goods, everything from rubber flip-flops and canned Spam to sugarcane and huge yams the size of your arm. It was the Jamaican equivalent of a mall I guess, with a special emphasis on food. And just like in a regular mall people were into socializing and hanging out and eating these little meat pies you can hold in your hand like tacos and sucking on stalks of sugarcane and cruising each other for different things from sex to gossip I guess or drugs.

I-Man I soon realized was making his regular once-a-week deliveries to people who probably lived too far from the ant farm or were too busy to come there in person. He was carrying a dozen or so one-pound bricks of grade A sinsemilla inside his old flight bag and he’d come up on some guy selling green parrots in homemade cages and they’d rap for a few minutes about this and that and then he’d just pull out the ganja which was wrapped in brown paper and pass it over in plain sight of the cops who were all around the place. The parrot guy’d say thanks and stash the dope under his table and count out the hundred and fifty bucks or whatever was the going wholesale price, something I could never quite figure since I never saw any scales or anything and they mostly used Jamaican money which I wasn’t used to yet. I figured I-Man and his posse were middlemen though, not producers and there was wholesale which they did mostly at the ant farm and there was retail which they did out here on the streets and the more you bought the less it cost per pound unless they didn’t know you or you were a rich white guy which I guess is the same free enterprise system as everywhere.

Speaking of money by now I wanted some of my own because of getting pissed from having to always bum cigarettes and beers and suchlike off of I-Man and the posse although nobody ever got uptight about it or anything due to the ant farm being like a commune and whenever I apologized for bumming another Craven A or a Red Stripe when the guys’d kick back over a few brewskies and cricket on the beach I-Man’d say, From each accordin’ to him ability, Bone, an’ to each accordin’ to him need. Which was irie with me except that without a little cash on hand my needs kept exceeding my abilities. My only previous work experience though was in dealing small-load dope and spare-changing neither of which was a useful skill here especially spare-changing. That is until at the marketplace in Mobay I started seeing all these white people mixed in with the Jamaicans.

So I split off from I-Man for a while and tried hitting on some sunburned tourist types wearing straw hats and carrying video cams and checking out the natives, male and female couples who sometimes are easier to spare-change because one of the two will try to harsh on the other for being too suspicious and he or usually she will give the poor kid a couple of quarters. I tried to look worried and scared and said I was on a class trip and my teacher and everybody else in the group’d left for Kingston in the van early without me and I just needed seventeen dollars to meet up with them or I’d miss the plane back to Connecticut and get left behind in Jamaica, which would’ve worked probably except that both the couples I hit on turned out to be German or Italian or something. They just shrugged and smiled and wagged their heads no comprendo until finally I gave up and held it my hand and said, Spare change, man? which I guess is universal because they said no loud and clear and acted disgusted that a white American boy’d act that way in front of all these poor starving Jamaicans.

I was wishing I’d run into some of the Indiana party animals who I figured would be relieved to buy some ganja from a white kid who spoke regular English instead of having to deal with a scary black Jamaican like I-Man, exploit my fellow Americans’ race thing in other words, and who knows, if it worked turn it into a regular job with I-Man and the posse, specializing in paranoid package tourists at the hotels. Having their own white kid on the stall so to speak’d give I-Man and the posse a definite advantage over the competition when it came to the tourist trade, I thought and then I wondered if I-Man’d already figured that out long ago, back in Plattsburgh even and had just eased me along without me knowing it, recruiting me and this was all a sort of apprenticeship in the ganja trade and if I came up believing it was my idea instead of his I’d never feel like he’d victimized me or anything or that he’d taken advantage of an innocent kid.