Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

My father put his cigarette into an ashtray and took mine and did the same and then he placed his hands on my shoulders. He held me away from him and looked into my face like he was looking into his own distant past and his eyes filled up.

Then he said, Ah, Jesus, Chappie, thank God you’ve finally found me, son, and he pulled me against his chest and hugged me hard and my own eyes filled up but I didn’t cry because even though I knew that from now on everything was going to be different I didn’t know in what way so in the middle of the moment that should’ve been the happiest moment of my life so far I was scared instead.

He stepped back and caught my crossed bones and he said smiling, What’s that?

It’s a tat. A tattoo.

Lemme see it, he said and he drew my arm toward him and turned it over like a mainliner looking for a vein to shoot. That’s because of the name? Bone?

Vicey-versie.

Then he dropped my arm and looked at me from way up there and he laughed. Ah, you little devil. Yeah. Yeah. you’re my son all right! he said and he hugged me again.

After that there was a continuous flurry of activities you might say, except when my father had to go back to Kingston to work as a doctor which he did three or four days a week. Instead of calling the place Starport I named it the Mothership on account of how Evening Star ran it but only to myself and I-Man because nobody else up there seemed to have too good a sense of humor about the scene, not even my father. There were all these lost animals Evening Star took in, like dogs and cats and goats and birds. Plus the people who I called the campers. I-Man didn’t know what campers were so I had to explain but it got lost in the translation I guess because he still didn’t get it.

Mostly though the campers were from the States, the white ones at least and the females and the rest were Jamaican dudes who were hanging mainly for what they could get out of the Americans who were like these artist types and older and compared to the Jamaicans rich. The really rich one it looked to me was Evening Star. I think she was like an heiress and the Mothership’d been one of her family’s estates and she paid for everything, I noticed.

When my father wasn’t there the campers pretty much ignored me, even Evening Star so I could lurk in the background so to speak and check things out on my own with I-Man. Except for the three or four little kids from the neighborhood who did yard chores and ran errands for tips the Jamaicans were natties, these good-looking young dudes with starter dreads and terrific builds most of them walking around barefoot in only loose shorts that sometimes showed their units and making out on the couches and suchlike with the white American women and I suppose hooking up with them later. The females were like middle-aged but generally pretty hip and good-looking and I guess single or else their husbands were still back in the States making some more money or something. There were usually two or three of them, different ones because whenever Evening Star’d drive one down to the airport to go home to the States she’d come back with a new one to replace her or a few days later a taxi’d drive up the hill with one. The natties more or less stayed the same. It was a little weird to see older women acting like that and I could actually understand the natties better since they were mainly into hustling anyhow, Jamaica being such a poor country and all but the whole thing made me want to puke sometimes.

It’s hard to explain. I usually don’t give a shit what other people do so long as it’s what they want to do. But it was like the white American females were into young black guys and were probably scared of hitting on a regular black guy from the States who would’ve known where they were coming from and would’ve told them to fuck off so instead they hooked up with these black dudes who were basically permanently broke and didn’t even know anybody they could steal off of for a living. I could tell the females felt superior to the natties, plus they could fly back to the States whenever they felt like it and live a regular life but the natties were stuck here hustling forever.

Rent-a-Rastas, I-Man called them but I think he was pissed more because of the way they pretended to be followers of Jah like him and went around Rasta-rapping all the time about Babylon and Zion and one love and suchlike to impress the females, than because of them selling themselves so cheap. They weren’t exactly skeezers, those guys but when you thought about it if they were their price tag was too cheap. That’s what bugged me, I think. Like they got to hang out around the pool and smoke a lot of free ganja and all and snort some coke and listen to reggae on boss speakers and I guess for a Jamaican the food was pretty good at the Mothership because Evening Star liked putting out these awesome meals on the porch every night with candles and everything and they got to have sex with white women, but that was about it. No actual money changed hands. People who have to sell themselves ought to be paid in cash is what I think.

Me the campers treated like just another neighborhood kid except when my father was around and suddenly I became the little prince. They handled I-Man though like he was a movie star or something due to him being a real heavy-dread Rasta-man from the olden days especially Evening Star and the natties who thought I-Man’d hung with Bob Marley and Toots and the Wailers and all which he probably did since Jamaica’s such a small country and back then in the seventies there weren’t that many real Rastas anyhow except for Bob and Toots and the rest of the Kingston reggae posse. They’d like ask him, I-Man, did you really know those guys? and he’d say, I-and-I an’ Ras-Bob, we be like brudders, mon. Toots-him, Toots be cool too. I-and-I an’ Toots an’ Bob, we he schoolbwoys togedder, mon. Then he’d go all dreamy like he was remembering the olden golden days in the ghetto so you couldn’t really tell, plus nobody’d push him very hard on the subject I guess because everybody even me wanted to believe we were hanging with this cool dude who’d been almost famous.

In general I-Man chilled and ignored the poolside activities on account of having to meditate a lot and not being into any of the females but when he came around and joined the campers at the chillum pipe which he did on a regular basis they’d all deal with him like he was Grandfather Dread full of Irie wisdom and in a sense he was. He was into it too, I could see. He’d talk the talk and walk the walk. They’d come up and check out his awesome Jah-stick and a couple times one of the natties reached out to touch the lion’s head on top and got zapped just like the Delta Airlines lady in Burlington which really busted everybody’s brains when it happened and made them go all wide-eyed and respectful although by now I knew from checking it out at the ant farm once when he was sleeping that he’d just planted these tiny sewing needles into the lion’s head where the whiskers were and on the tip of each of the ears that you couldn’t see unless you got real close and he’d like move the stick a fraction and stick you good with one of the needles and you’d think it was Rasta magic. To me it was a joke but I didn’t say anything. I just made like I was used to magic from I-Man and touched the Jah-stick whenever I felt like it because you could avoid the pins easy if you knew they were there.

Basically though for I-Man the situation was cool because he got to sell a whole lot of weed to the campers and their friends, so much that he had to make a trip every few days back down to the ant farm for more. Plus I think he’d started using the resident natties to do some dealing in the neighborhood so for him it was like setting up a branch office. For me it was okay too at least for now. I liked Evening Star quite a lot mainly because she was my father’s old lady but also she didn’t ignore me as much as most of the others did and asked me questions like what was my sign and so on. Plus she let me help with the cooking since from living with I-Man I already knew quite a bit about how to make Ital food, the main kind of food they had up there except when somebody came in from the States and brought a lot of what she called goodies that they couldn’t get in Jamaica like special canned hams and salamis and once even smoked oysters the same as I’d learned to enjoy during my days holed up with Russ at the Ridgeways’ summerhouse. I-Man of course didn’t eat any of that stuff but the natties’d all join in in spite of Rastafarians not being allowed to eat pig or any animal that comes from the ocean and doesn’t know how to swim, which is smoked oysters to a T. Also other good things like crabs and lobsters. People sitting around eating ham and oysters and suchlike’d send ol’ I-Man into a funk for days and he’d diss everybody for it especially the natties and then go hole up in the back of the livingroom alone in the dark with his arms crossed over his chest and like glower so I always ate the deaders in secret even though I myself never made any great claims to being a Rasta-in-training and didn’t have any image to protect. I just did it to be kind.