Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

My father came and went a lot and the deal was I’d help out around the Mothership for room and board when he was gone doing chores like the kids from the neighborhood and then when he was back at the Mothership him and me’d work hard at being a real father and son team going places together and talking about the past and all. It wasn’t like we went fishing or played baseball or anything cheesy like that, he wasn’t that kind of dude and I wasn’t either. It was more like he took me into Mobay in the Range Rover to score some coke off a guy who ran the Holiday Inn and another time we went out to Negril to do a money deal with a Jamaican real estate guy where you exchange American dollars for Jamaican money at a different rate than at the bank and he explained how this sort of thing worked which was pretty interesting and all in case I ever got my hands on some American cash.

He was cool but he wasn’t what you’d call a normal father. He didn’t want me crashing with him in Kingston he said because he was gone all the time and the apartment was only a one-bedroom but I figured it was a girlfriend. He was the kind of guy who’d have one and Evening Star was the kind of old lady who wouldn’t give a shit as long as she didn’t have to deal with her in person and my father was too smart for that. I asked him about doctoring and he said he worked in a hospital in Kingston but didn’t seem to want to talk about it particularly so I didn’t push it. I guess it was like he’d done in Au Sable at the clinic when he was an x-ray expert under false pretenses and had gotten my mom to cover for him. He’d done a lot of trampoosing since he left Au Sable and he sat up late sometimes with me and I-Man out on the porch when everybody else’d gone off to hook up, telling us about his travels to places like Florida and Haiti.

One night he even apologized for abandoning me back when I was five. It was your mother, he said. If it hadn’t been for her I’d’ve never left you, Bone, he said. I liked it that he called me Bone when he knew he didn’t have to. Those days I’d’ve let him call me anything he wanted. He could’ve called me Buck.

My mom’d wanted to throw him in jail for nonpayment of alimony, he explained and he knew if he was locked up he’d’ve only ended up ruining not just his own life but my life too because A, there was no way he could raise any money while he was in jail anyhow and B, he knew I’d have to grow up in a small town where everybody’d look down on me because my father was a jailbird, so before my mom and the sheriff could bust him he’d fled the country. He said he’d planned to make some money elsewhere so he could send it to me later like in secret but he was never able to figure out how to get it to me without my mom and the sheriff knowing. And there was no way once my mom got married again he was going to send her money so she could just hand it over to my stepfather who was a pure piece of shit. All these years, he told me, he’d been like waiting for me to come to him on my own. And now I’d done it.

* * *

The Mothership was huge like a hotel with all these bedrooms on the second floor and there was a small empty one at the end of the long upstairs hall that Evening Star gave me for myself the first night that had two beds in it. The very next day my father and I got my stuff from the ant farm including my old stuffed woodcock and the classical CDs which I still hadn’t played and I moved in there more or less permanently and I-Man shared the room with me when he wasn’t down at the ant farm himself loading up on fresh weed or traveling around the countryside setting up branch offices or dealing it himself. Most of the rest of the bedrooms up there were for the visitors from the States and whoever they happened to hook up with, plus there was the poolhouse that had its own bedroom and kitchen and then a couple of cabins they called cabanas out in the woods by the garden that people slept in.

Evening Star and my father who I’d started calling Pa by now so’s not to call him Dad like I did my stepfather slept in the master bedroom which was downstairs in back. They had like their own bathroom and a private screened-in porch and everything back there but they didn’t really sleep together like a married couple since Pa was a night owl, probably due to him liking coke so much and Evening Star was an early-to-bed early-to-rise kind of person which is generally true of people who’re into weed but still want to be in charge of things.

Usually after a long day of slightly criminal activities with Pa and a night of father-son talk with him doing most of the talking and me most of the listening I’d go up the wide center stairs around two or three in the morning and crash. I-Man’d already be snoring but I’d still be wired especially if I’d had a taste of Pa’s coke so for hours I’d lie there listening to Pa walking around downstairs in the kitchen or playing old seventies tunes like the Bee Gees on the stereo in the livingroom until finally I fell asleep myself. Then real early the sun would wake me up since my room was on the east side of the house and no curtains and I’d hear Evening Star down below running the vacuum cleaner and washing dishes and emptying ashtrays. I was starting to wonder when they ever got it on.

This one morning after the sun came up I couldn’t fall back to sleep so I came downstairs and over coffee me and Evening Star got to talking in the kitchen about my sign which is Leo the lion and seemed to impress her quite a lot due to how the Rastas always talk about Haile Selassie being the Lion of Judah and all. Your astrological sign, she said, is your entry point to the universe. It’s the place where y’all step off the astral plane, darlin’, and land on the planetary plane, and that’s why it determines your character and your fate!

Yeah but there’s about eleven other signs, right? Twelve in all?

That’s right! she said all excited.

Like fucking duh, I’m thinking. But I go, That means one-twelfth of all the billions of people on earth have the same sign as me, okay? Millions and millions of people all over the world and they’re all like Leos, okay? With the same character and fate as me. Except so far like I haven’t run into a single person whose character and fate’re anything like mine. You know what I’m saying? Like maybe all the other Leos are living in China or someplace.

No, no, no, honey, she said. Listen. Everybody on this planet is a unique creation. It’s very complicated, honey. Listen. Y’all have a rising sign and a falling sign, and so forth, and the other signs have an impact on your major sun sign, which is your birth sign, depending on how far or close they are. It’s very complicated, darlin’. They’re like planets affecting each other’s orbits around the sun. You know something, Bone, y’all should be more metaphysically open, she said. Then she asked me when my actual birthday was and I told her and she said that’s this week, only three days from now which surprised me because I hadn’t known what date it was for a long time, ever since I went back to the schoolbus after being at the Ridgeways’ and I thought my birthday was still a long ways off. We’ve got to give you a party, darlin’, she said. A birthday party!

That’s cool, I said. And it was, even though I knew Evening Star was always looking for an excuse to toss a party and that’s all it was, an excuse. Still, nobody’d given me a party in a long time.

My father had like his own driver who worked for the government or something and dropped him off and picked him up and stayed with relatives in Mobay when Pa was at the Mothership, and he was heading back over to Kingston the next day so Evening Star decided to put the party together that same night because like she said it’d be the first time me and him’d been together on my birthday since I was a teeny-weeny bwoy. That’s how she talked, a little of this and a little of that so you never knew who you’d be hearing, it might be a white middle-aged southern rich lady one minute or a regular kid like me using words like buff chick and crankin’ or a Rasta wannabe off on an Irie-rap or a kindergarten mommy at sandbox time which is what I got a lot of when it was just the two of us. I guess from being around so many different types of people all her life and smoking excellent herb all these many years she didn’t have any more words left inside her that were strong enough to block out the words coming from outside and I wondered what her thoughts were like when she was alone. She was like an actress who was playing a bunch of different people in a bunch of different plays all at the same time.