Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

You think I shouldn’t?

Up to you, Bone. But I-and-I headin’ fe de Cockpit now.

I didn’t know what the Cockpit was exactly unless it was the little village in the boonies he’d talked about back in the schoolbus when he was homesick and all which if it was I had a pretty good mental picture of the place and at that moment it seemed to have a lot of advantages over the Mothership especially since I wasn’t as interested as before in like turning into Baby Doc so I said, Yeah. Yeah, I’m comin’. Lemme get my stuff first and I’ll meet you out back.

He said Irie and took up his Jah-stick and stepped outside into the moonlit backyard while I ran upstairs to my room where I tossed my old stuffed bird and the classical CDs which I still hadn’t listened to and my few articles of clothing into my backpack. I was headed back down the hall toward the stairs when I looked over the railing and down and saw Pa with his gun in his hand walk through the door into the livingroom where he stood in a patch of moonlight and sniffed and looked around like he was a snake planning his next move. Just then the door to his and Evening Star’s bedroom opened and she came out into the moonlit livingroom all naked and the two of them faced each other with me up above in the darkness looking down.

C’mon, Doc, she said in a low patient voice like she was calling in one of her dogs. C’mon in to bed now. Party’s over.

Bone saw you and the nigger, he said.

She sighed like she was real tired and said, Yeah. I know.

I’ll have to kill him, you understand. Or have him killed.

Not tonight, darlin’. C’mon in now.

Then he said like she looked pretty good standing there naked in the moonlight and she laughs and says he looks good too because of the gun in his hand which turns her on, and they start walking slowly toward each other with him already unbuckling his belt with his free hand so I take this opportunity to tiptoe back to my room at the far end of the hall. I went straight to the one window and opened it and crawled out onto the roof of the laundry room and with my backpack on I swung out and went hand over hand along the overhanging branch of this big breadfruit tree back there and then shinnied down the trunk to the ground where I-Man stood watching in the shadows.

Ready, Bone? he said.

Lead on, man. Babylon’s behind us now, I said and he made his little chuckling laugh and turned and led me into the bush.

It was late the next afternoon before we finally got up to Accompong in the Cockpit Country which turned out to be like I’d thought, I-Man’s hometown that he’d been so homesick for back in the States. It took about four different rides to hitch in because Accompong is a long ways from Mobay and not many people go there so we had to spend a lot of time just chilling by the side of these winding country roads and rode sometimes in the back of pickups and had to walk the last four or five miles uphill from the main road in to the village. When we got there it was sort of the way I’d pictured, basically a single dirt street with grass growing in the middle and a dozen or so cabins and small houses and a few more you could see scattered around in the jungle and all these little veggie gardens and banana trees and kids running around in underpants and old guys snoozing in the shade of a breadfruit tree and goats and the occasional pig and females carrying baskets of yams on their heads or plastic pails of water from the well.

One reason they call it Cockpit Country must be on account of the way the land looks. For miles and miles around as far as you can see they have like these huge deep craters or pits where the ground dropped out way back in ancient times and they’re all covered with trees and vines and thornbushes and so on and the people who live up in the Cockpit are more like ridge runners than they are mountain climbers and don’t like to go down into the craters unless they have to for a lost goat or kid or to hide out from the cops or their other enemies. Due to the hundreds of caves down in the pits and the thickness of the bush hiding out is basically what people have been doing up there for like hundreds of years, I-Man explained to me. The people who live there are called Maroons, he said because of the reddish tint to their skin which the truth is I couldn’t see, they all looked like regular black people to me only darker. But they’re all descended from these incredibly tough Africans who were called Ashantis and after they were captured in Africa and shipped over to Jamaica they escaped into the bush the first chance they had and then kicked ass when the white slavecatchers came after them until finally the slavecatchers said fuck it and went back to their sugar plantations on the coast and just let the Maroons live out there on their own and said don’t send us any more of those Ashanti warrior types and that’s when the Queen of England signed a peace treaty with the head Maroon whose name was Cudjoe.

Nowadays though the place was full of ganja growers and miscellaneous criminals who were raised here and went to the city and fucked up and came back plus some regular Jamaican farmers and suchlike but they still pretty much lived like their Maroon ancestors and didn’t have electricity or running water or TV or cars or any of the other modern conveniences. Also a lot of Rastas had their groundations up there in the Cockpit and I-Man said the real reason it’s named Cockpit is because it’s always been the place where the Rastafarian ascendants of the old African Ashanti warriors sattar fe control de universe.

All the way up from Mobay throughout the long night after we’d made our escape from Papa Doc and the greathouse and while we chilled by the side of the road out of Mobay waiting for a ride I-Man was really into teaching me this stuff about the Maroons and Accompong and the old Ashanti warriors, like he’d decided I was ready now to learn these things and use them in my daily life even though I was still a white kid from America. But I was feeling weird and guilty from when I told Pa about how I-Man’d hooked up with Evening Star which was why we were on the run in the first place and I-Man wasn’t making it any easier by treating me like his favorite student or something.

I hadn’t figured out yet why I’d done it and I couldn’t ask I-Man the way I usually did when I couldn’t figure something out so I was slipping into blaming white people generally and saying to myself I must’ve done it because of my background in lying and betrayal that I’d learned as a child from my stepfather and other adults who all happened to be white. I-Man’d be running on about the old Ashantis and the slavecatchers and how they’d hunted the Ashantis down with these humongous man-eating dogs from Panama and I’d be thinking, Fucking Babylon, man, white people really suck, you can never trust them, et cetera, like that was letting me off the hook for almost getting I-Man killed by my own father.

There were maybe a few hundred people living in the village of Accompong and a few hundred more living in the surrounding area and everybody said they were Maroons and were related to everybody else or that’s how it seemed anyhow and I guess it was true because you couldn’t be one without being the other, so the Maroons were like a tribe, you could say. They owned all the land in the Cockpit together and shared it on account of the treaty their great-grandfathers’d signed with the Queen of England more or less like the Mohawks at home and other American Indians. Except the Maroons didn’t call the Cockpit a reservation, it was more like an independent country called Accompong inhabited and ruled exclusively by the Maroons, at least the way they talked about it it was. They had a chief and everything and even a secretary of state who were these really old guys that I saw a couple of times from a distance but never got to talk to because I-Man right after we got there set me up out in the bush far from the village where he had his groundation and that’s pretty much where I stayed.