Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

After a few days of chilling and mainly tending the new green shoots I got waked up in my hammock by Rubber one morning to tell me that I-Man was down in Mobay making the final arrangements with Nighthawk and he’d sent word that we were supposed to get ready for delivery the next night. What this meant was lugging all the bales of ganja on our backs, on our heads actually over hill and dale about three miles still further into the Cockpit where there was a flat space about the size of a basketball court cleared along the ridge of one of the pits and no road in or out so I finally realized that Nighthawk was a guy with a plane although it was hard to see how a regular plane could land and take off on such a small space.

We worked all that day and the next, me and Rubber and Terron and Elroy carrying the ganja from the groundation to the airfield where we stashed it under some more of Ronald Reagan’s camouflage. I could only lug one bale at a time on my head but the other guys could handle two so I felt kind of useless. They didn’t care though and we did a lot of joking and suchlike while we hauled the bales because spirits were up then. Everybody I guess was sniffing the end of another successful growing season and a big payday and I was starting to wonder if I was going to get a share of the profits too and if I did what I’d do with it. Rubber was going to buy a motorcycle, a Honda he said all excited like it wasn’t just Jap shit and then he planned to go out to Negril and fuck American college girls. Rubber was pretty weird-looking though, almost comical and could only talk the native language so I didn’t think he’d score much with American females even driving a Harley which I don’t think they have in Jamaica. Terron was into buying a huge outdoor sound system and becoming a DJ with a friend who had a pickup and could carry it around the island to all the dance parties, and Elroy said he was going to pay for his mother to have an operation on her hips so she could walk again which I thought was cool. I-Man I didn’t know about since he never mentioned money except to put it down and diss people who liked it although I’d noticed that ever since I’d known him he always had a few bucks in his pocket when he needed it which wasn’t true of any other Jamaican I’d met so far. Of course the only Jamaicans I knew were really poor. But I think I-Man was one of those guys who decided in the beginning to live the same when he had lots of money as when he didn’t have a penny and it’d worked out that he lived somewhere in the middle all the time and never had to think about it much one way of the other. That’s pretty much what I was planning to do with my share if I got one.

Anyhow the next night around seven we’d finally finished hauling all the bales to the airfield and were sitting around out there waiting for Nighthawk to make the pickup. After a few hours of nothing happening I-Man suddenly showed up, he like just stepped out of the bush and touched us on our shoulders without us once hearing him until there he was which was the way he usually came up on people, like he’d been beamed up invisible and then materialized right before your eyes. I was starting to take seriously all this stuff about I-Man being a magician that Rubber and the guys’d been telling me, an obi man they called him, even though I’d known him when he was an illegal alien escapee from an apple farm in upstate New York. Plus all the stories about those old Africans who could fly. There was even one I-Man’d told me about this famous Maroon female warrior named Nonny who could catch the slavecatchers’ bullets in her pussy and turn around and bend over and shoot the bullets right back at them with her ass.

Sometime after midnight I guess it was I-Man stood up and said time to light the torches and led us out into the field where there were these sticks in the ground with dried palm leaves tied around the top. By the time he’d lit the first one I heard the plane that he must’ve heard earlier so we started running from one torch to the other lighting them real fast. When they were all going I saw they made like a rectangle of lights and pretty soon the plane buzzed past and cut a wide turn and came back the other way a few hundred feet from the ground just over the trees and then dropped down at the edge of the field and skidded across it and came to a stop at the end right next to where we’d stacked the ganja bales.

It went real fast then. The plane was like one of those old-fashioned two-engine jobs you see on the late movie and Nighthawk who was a fat white guy in a muscle shirt and Bermuda shorts and high-tops jumps out by the side door carrying an Uzi, the first I’d ever seen up close and says for us in American to hurry the fuck up, I’m running late, like he’s got a dentist appointment. Me and the posse go right to work then loading the bales while I-Man and Nighthawk stand off to one side watching and smoking cigarettes and talking business I guess, but then as I’m passing by them with a bale on my head I hear Nighthawk say, Who’s the white kid?

I pass my bale to Terron who’s doing the stacking inside and go back and hear I-Man say, Baby Doc, and the guy says, No shit? Doc’s got a white kid? and I keep going because we’re like in a line and Rubber’s practically stepping on my heels and grab another bale and come back. This time they’re arguing a little, I-Man and Nighthawk who says, I don’t give a fuck what you thought.

Next time I go by Nighthawk’s saying, Don’t sweat it, man, it’ll be there tomorrow, next day at the latest. I-Man’s pissed, I can tell, he’s got that dark pulled-down face on with pursed lips and his arms crossed on his chest and a few seconds later he pulls away from Nighthawk and starts helping us finish the loading.

The second we’re done Nighthawk without saying goodbye or thanks or anything takes his Uzi and climbs inside his plane, closes the door and cranks up his engines and while we’re running off the field he turns the plane and aims it back the way he came in. It rumbles across the little field looking like a pregnant pigeon or something, real slow and heavy and I’m wondering if it can even take off with that load but at the end of the field it turns and comes back toward us again going faster and faster and then it’s off the ground and zooms over our heads just clearing the palm trees behind us and in a few seconds it’s gone and in a few more you couldn’t even hear it.

* * *

What happened was the guy who was supposed to give Nighthawk the money for I-Man had come in from the States late and got hung up in customs in Mobay or something so Nighthawk had to fly out to the Cockpit without the money and without even his own pay, he said. But because the deal’d already been made for delivery of the ganja in Haiti the next day and couldn’t be postponed or the whole thing’d come apart Nighthawk had agreed to go ahead as planned and get paid when he got back from Haiti and I-Man’d have to do the same.

I guess this kind of fuck-up happened a lot because once Nighthawk was gone I-Man didn’t seem pissed anymore and the next morning he came out to my cabin and said for me to come with him to Mobay fe sattar at the ant farm which I figured meant I was going to get a share of the profits just like the rest of the posse. This was excellent because I hadn’t had any honest money of my own for a long time. Since back when I was dealing weed to Bruce and the Adirondack Iron. Plus it was tourist season now and I-Man wanted me to follow up on my old idea of me dealing to the white party animals in the hotels who were too scared of black people to buy ganja from them. I’d thought he’d forgotten all about that but like he said, Everyt’ing in him season, Bone. Everyt’ing in him time.

We hooked a ride with a beer truck and got down to Mobay and out to the ant farm by late afternoon and chilled that night in one of the inner chambers with Prince Shabba who said the rest of the posse was playing in a reggae band downtown at Doctors Cave which is this famous beach and general hangout for rich white people and a good place for dealing small-load herb. It was a mellow night, just me and Shabba and I-Man listening to tapes on I-Man’s box and smoking from the stash and talking Rasta and the next morning I left the ant farm early to check out the scene at the Holiday Inn and some of the other hotels where the package tourists like from Indiana and other places in the Midwest go.