Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Besides I-Man there were only two Jamaican dudes at the Mothership then, a heavyset guy in his thirties named Jason who said he was a champion dominoes player even though he wasn’t too bright but he was giving me lessons so I liked him and this half-Chinese half-African light-skinned dude named Toker with a Fu Manchu mustache and a great build like Bruce Lee’s who was into selling I-Man’s herb locally and used the Mothership as a base to crash in and get laid sometimes and do his karate exercises. Plus there were two American females there that week, this tall bony college professor named Cynthia who spent all day lying by the pool and reading until she got toasted at the chillum around sunset and then she liked to drink rum and dance with Jason or Toker and wasn’t bad at it either for a skinny white woman her age, and this other younger woman named Jan who was Evening Star’s cousin from New Orleans and was a poet and I could tell didn’t approve of the fun and games aspect of life at the Mothership but didn’t want to diss anybody for it either so she went along and tried to make like she was having a lot of fun visiting her weird cousin in Jamaica.

Jan was more into the life of the natives so to speak than the others and she spent a lot of time trying to make I-Man and the natties give straight answers to questions about unemployment and family life and suchlike which are subjects they’re not used to talking about even though they know a lot about them from firsthand experience. I liked her though because she had a good low-voiced laugh and she’d break into it and shake her head when Jason or one of the other natties’d try to explain for instance how he wanted to go to the States to earn money to support his five kids and their three mothers and maybe she could help him get his visa et cetera. Or like I-Man’d get all somber and say, In Jamaica de ‘oman be like a shadow, Jan, an’ de mon be like an arrow, and Jan’d give out her laugh and say, Ain’t that the truth, sugar!

All that day Evening Star and I-Man hung in the kitchen cooking for the party while the other campers lounged around the Mothership as usual. Me and Pa and Jason spent the afternoon driving all over Mobay looking for a guy but never finding him that Pa knew who’d sell Jason a gun which he said he needed to kill a guy over in Negril who’d burned down his brother’s house. I didn’t think any of it was true, you hear a lot of stories like that and neither did Pa, but I could tell Pa was going to pay for the gun since Jason didn’t have any money of his own and then Jason’d end up owing it to him and it’d be like Pa having his own deputy with a gun who’d use it any way Pa wanted him to, which might come in handy someday. But we never found the guy.

When we got back to the house around six there were all these balloons strung around and a huge sign made out of three whole bedsheets and hung between some trees that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE BONE!!! Music was blasting across the hills from the speakers by the pool where there were big flaming torches up on poles and coolers full of ice and Red Stripe beer and tables with all these platters of Ital food plus regular Jamaican beans and rice and so on set out on them and bottles of rum and other drinks and a whole goat roasting on a grill and a big pot of soup made from the goat’s head and guts including his balls called mannish waters. It really looked like an incredible party for a much-loved person was about to begin.

Pretty soon practically the whole village started coming up the hill to the greathouse, families with little kids and old people and lots of natties from the neighborhood I’d seen chilling day and night down by the road to Mobay and I-Man’s dreadlocked posse from the ant farm even, Fattis and Prince Shabba and Buju who were real glad to see me and high-fived me like crazy plus a couple of white Jamaicans I’d never met before, heavy dudes with coffee-colored females who wore spiky high heels and showed lots of thigh, from Mobay I guess because they came in Benzes, and Pa’s driver was there with Pa’s black Buick and the customs guy I remembered from the airport, a huge crowd until the patios and porches and all around the pool and even the flower gardens were filled with people eating and drinking and dancing around to the music. Every time I looked Evening Star was at the center of the action like a dreadlocked white queen in a long lace dress you could almost see through and no underwear hugging and kissing people when they came up and telling them where the food was and the drinks and so on. I-Man was like consulting with his posse over a humongous chillum in the livingroom in front of his favorite Haitian picture, the one with the lion lying peacefully with the animals it usually eats. Cynthia and Jan were dancing with various and sundry Jamaican dudes while Jason tried to look like he was one of the people in charge by running the sound system and playing mostly dancehall and in between songs rapping on the mike like Yellowman the famous DJ and Toker showed off swimming laps until the pool got too crowded with kids jumping in. My father kind of drifted from one group to another looking cool and above it all and once in a while he’d see me and wink like we knew something nobody else did although I didn’t know what it was yet.

I was having a pretty good time just chilling by the pool smoking a J and packing back Red Stripes and watching people. I hate it when people sing Happy Birthday and clap but actually I was kind of waiting for the birthday cake to come out with the usual candles and all. I guess I’d figured it was going to be one of those Big Public Moments like where in front of a whole lot of people you mark the end of one life and the start of another even though I was only turning fifteen not twenty-one or forty and this wasn’t like a retirement party. Still, I was imagining a scene with Pa taking the mike from Jason and making a little speech to everyone about how his only son Bone after a terrible childhood in the States had found his way to him at last for protection to be raised by him into manhood here in Jamaica and I-Man would lean over while Pa was talking and say to me, Whole new world, Bone, whole new ex-peer-ience, and maybe after Pa finished his speech with a tear in his eye he’d come over and hug me and say, Welcome home, son, and just then Jason and maybe Jan would carry this huge cake out with fifteen candles blazing and Evening Star’d hold up her glass and start singing Happy Birthday to Bone and everybody’d join in, even the little kids who didn’t know me.

But it got later and later until eventually people started leaving except for the ones who’d crashed in the garden and bushes or passed out on the couches and pool chairs. Most of the booze and food was gone, even the mannish waters and the goat although there was still quite a lot of the Ital food left because not everybody likes that stuff, Jamaicans included. The dogs were wandering around looking for scraps and the cats were licking off the plates and up on the tables prowling among the leftovers and Jan and Jason were dancing real slow to a Dennis Brown song all wrapped up like snakes fucking which kind of made me sad even though I liked both of them better than the rest of the campers. I’d caught a glimpse of Cynthia the college professor tiptoeing off hours ago with Buju from I-Man’s posse, and the others, Prince Shabba and Fattis’d left without him. Toker I think’d split with Pa’s white friends in one of the Benzes for another party at the Holiday Inn. There was a cool breeze blowing that’d snuffed the last of the torches and knocked down two-thirds of the Happy Birthday to the Bone!!! sign so it just said Happy and the ten or so balloons that hadn’t been popped by the little kids earlier had gotten soft and wrinkly and paper plates and plastic cups were floating in the pool.