Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Baby Doc, I-Man said and he laughed too. Papa Doc an’ him baby.

They were like slipping around the subject but I kept asking and pretty soon it came out that my father was an actual doctor working for the government in Kingston about a hundred miles away and he lived over there in big government apartment and the woman he’d been with in the Range Rover was his girlfriend named Evening Star, this rich American who lived near here in a greathouse whatever that was and who he visited sometimes and came down to Mobay driving her car and so on.

Papa Doc a man you can deal wi’, I-Man said. Don’t know him ’oman though. Him call Evenin’ Star?

The cop said oh yeah he knew her all right, most everybody in Mobay knew Evenin’ Star and knew her house too, big fancy place with lots of different people hanging out including Doc. Dem mostly jus’ limin’, the cop said and he told us where the greathouse was located which wasn’t far, this town called Montpelier maybe eight or ten miles into the hills. I-Man shrugged and said we could go up there by bus if I wanted and I said, Excellent. Let’s go now.

No problem, I-Man said and off we went with the cop kind of smirking after like he smelled something we didn’t but I just figured it was because he knew I-Man was going up there to check out the ganja-selling possibilities, not just to help me find my father which was okay by me. Everybody’s got his own agenda and that’s cool. The good thing about I-Man was he never laid his agenda down on top of mine. Unlike certain people. He always just said, Up t’ you, Bone.

We rode this old top-heavy wheezing green bus that was all decorated with Rasta designs like lions wearing crowns and even had a name on the front, Zion Gate up a long curvy hill with cliffs that dropped away from the edge of the narrow road into gorges and you could see rusting cars and trucks and even a crashed bus way at the bottom with the jungle growing back over them and little cabins close by the side of the road where kids stood at the door and watched as we passed and women were washing clothes next to a stream and so on. Until finally we came to a village which I guessed was Montpelier with a couple of one-room convenience stores the same as we have Stewart’s and 7-Elevens at home only smaller and when we got off the bus and went inside one of them for Craven A’s it had hardly anything to sell, like canned milk and yellow cheese and rum and beer was about it.

I-Man asked the woman behind the counter for directions to the home of the Evening Star which she rattled off in Jamaican too fast for me to understand. Then we came back out and walked along the road a ways and cut off it up this long winding lane to the left where there were little cinderblock houses with tin roofs set back in the bushes with goats lunching on the brush and pigs wandering loose or sleeping in the yard and little blond dogs yapping at us as we passed, a white kid wearing doo-rag and a Rasta with a Jah-stick from away heading slowly uphill. As we walked we got occasional peeks and views of the bright blue ocean way below. Hummingbirds and regular birds too flew alongside us and there were loads of butterflies making loops and there weren’t any more houses after a while, just the lane and the trees and vines and the birds and butterflies and those big black buzzards they call John Crows circling high overhead. It was real quiet and we were sweating pretty good from the climb by now and I was wondering if maybe I-Man’d heard the lady with the directions wrong.

But pretty soon we came over the top of this mountain where we could see down through the hills and valleys below gaining a sudden wideview panoramic look all the way to the ocean and could even see Mobay down there looking like a regular seaport town with boats and white buildings and orange rooftops and all, and for a minute I was remembering the terrific view of the Adirondacks from the Ridgeways’ summerhouse. Then when we walked a little ways further we came around a corner and saw this fancy old sign that said STARPORT which I knew was the house’s name, not the people who owned it and I almost lost my locale and was back on East Hill Road in Keene with Russ instead of I-Man that day after I first got my tat and took the name Bone.

A small black goat with blue eyes stood in the bushes though and stared at me and I-Man and that brought me straight back to Jamaica, and then there were these big stone pillars that we went through and suddenly we’re in this fantastic terraced yard with green grass and all kinds of flowers growing and these strange statues all over the place of life-size American-type animals like rabbits and foxes and beavers and suchlike painted white except for their eyes and nostrils and mouths which were bright red. They were a little on the strange side. It was definitely an unusual kind of yard, like you expected them to be making a movie there or a fancy restaurant.

The driveway curled up a long ways to this huge white-stone two-story ancient house from France or England set on the side of the mountain looking down on Mobay and the sea ten miles away like it ruled the countryside and a duke or a minor king lived in it. We came up on it from below peering up at its majesty like on our hands and knees showing reverence only we were just walking along the driveway trying to look cool, leastways I was. The house was real old, I think from slavery days but fixed up with lots of columns along the front and huge high windows and like patios all around and more animal statues with the red eyes and mouths placed here and there on the patio walls. There was a swimming pool over at the right side of the house and you could see some white people and black people standing around up there with glasses in their hands and a couple of white females with bikinis in the group who didn’t have anything over their tits the same as the guys. Then on the left over at the other side of the house and toward the front I saw a few parked cars, including the Range Rover.

All of a sudden I got incredibly nervous. Like what if he told me to fuck off? I knew he was my real father for sure so I wasn’t worried it was a case of mistaken identity but what if he denied he even had a son my age named Chappie who he’d left behind in upstate New York almost ten years ago? What if he didn’t like me personally? What if he thought I was too short or something?

Then there was this roaring noise and I thought it was a bomb going off but it was a humongous blast of music coming from the pool area like from a live reggae concert. It was Baldhead Bridge by Culture which I recognized from the ant farm tapes and it was booming out these two huge black speakers up on the wall by the pool that were the size of refrigerators, the kind you see at outdoor concerts in the States and they were aimed away from the pool and rocked the universe out there, slamming reggae down through the gardens and the jungle covered hills all the way along the steep valley to Mobay practically and the folks up at the pool now were dancing around with the females’ tits jiggling and the guys bobbing and snapping along, everyone with spliffs and drink in their hands. The music was so loud and the bass was so heavy it controlled your heartbeat and I was thinking the leaves’d start coming off the trees any minute and the white animals might crack and crumble from it.

As we went up the long set of wide steps to the front door I-Man leans into me and he goes, Jah-sniffers, Bone, and looked suddenly real serious instead of how he usually looked which was only curious and patient. Then we were standing on this long wide porch in front of a huge open door and could see inside the house to I guess the living room which was dark and all paneled and filled with fancy couches and long tables and a big set of stairs disappearing above and a bunch of bamboo birdcages with green parrots and other birds in them and all these weird paintings on the walls of wild animals and tropical scenery like they’d been painted by a little kid on acid and for a second I wanted to get out of there and back to the ant farm where things were more normal.