Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Mainly I was on a research mission to see how hard it’d be to hang out by the pools and the bars and beachfronts which were off limits except to hotel guests and talk to people. And like I thought, it turned out real easy for me on account of being white to stroll pretty much wherever I wanted to and I talked to quite a few party animals of all different ages and interests and pretty soon had more orders for ganja than I could keep in my head and had to cop a pencil and paper from one of the waiters at the Casa Montego to make notes. It wasn’t much, a quarter ounce here, a half there but it added up fast and I was psyched.

By around three in the afternoon I’m headed back to the ant farm to get the goods so I can make my deliveries before party time and I’m really stoked because this is the first time I’ve been able to do a job for I-Man and the posse that nobody else can do even though it’s only on account of the color of my skin. The ant farm is located a few miles out beyond Rose Hall off the Falmouth Road and when I come up on the path that leads down through the bushes to it I see this same dark brown Benz parked by the side of the road that’d blown by me awhile ago right after I’d given up hitching and decided to walk the rest of the way in. Anyhow I’m thinking, Cool, this is the money guy from the States as promised so I bop on down but when I get there nobody’s around. At least not out in the yard in front of the entrance where I’d expected them to be. Just I-Man’s box playing a Black Uhuru tape real slow like the batteries are low again and his Jah-stick lying on the ground.

I pushed open the main door and walked into the first room, past the picture gallery of Martin Luther King and the other heroes and into the next, and so on through several more chambers but nobody’s there and I can’t hear anybody talking. Weird, I’m thinking but I was curious to see how a deal like this goes down in case I ever got the chance to do one myself someday so I kept on wandering through the many inter-connected chambers of the ant farm expecting every time I turned a corner to see I-Man being handed a leather briefcase full of crisp new American bills like on TV.

It’s sort of like a video game maze back in there and you can wander around in circles for days but once you’re used to it from living there like I was you pretty much know where you are all the time and can generally remember the way out in spite of there being no windows, even though all you can remember exactly is the last room you were in before this one and all you can predict is the next room off of it. Anyhow I’m standing in the middle of one of the center rooms where we sometimes gathered fe deal wi’ de chillum and some mellow drumming when I hear a lot of movement on the other side of the bamboo wall and then the curtain is brushed away and in walks Nighthawk with his Uzi and right behind him is Jason who I remember from the Mothership and he’s got a gun too, a short-nosed blue niner and right behind Jason is a white guy in a safari jacket I’ve never seen before.

They’re looking real pissed all three and in a wicked rush. Nighthawk grabs me by the shoulder and says, How the fuck d’we get outa here, kid! and the white guy who I guess is the American with the money says, Jesus, who’s this? and that’s the moment when I realized that something terrible’d happened.

Jason looks at me like he doesn’t recognize who I am but Nighthawk says, Doc’s kid the Rasta told me.

The white guy in the safari jacket goes, Doc’s kid? Doc doesn’t have any white kid, for Christ’s sake. The fucking Rasta’s fulla shit.

No, I seen him last night, Nighthawk says. He was workin’ for the Rasta.

The American guy says, Well, get the little bastard to tell us how to get the fuck outa here and do him. And hurry the fuck up, he says and steps back like he doesn’t want to get any of my blood on his jacket.

Nighthawk shoved me back against the wall and I banged off of it and fell down and when I looked up he was standing over me with the barrel of his Uzi staring the in the eye. C’mon, kid, where’s the fucking exit?

I said to go out the door behind me and keep bearing left which was approximately correct and as close as I could say anyhow. I can lead you out better than tell you though, I said.

Just then Jason put his face down by me and said, Bone? Dat really you wid all dem dreadlocks, mon?

I go, Yeah. Wussup, Jason.

He smiles and turns to the American and tells him I’m Doc’s kid all right and I used to live with Doc up on the hill but I ran off with the Rasta last summer.

Fuck! the American says.

Then Nighthawk says, We shouldn’t do a white kid anyhow, man. No matter whose kid he is. Too much trouble, especially since he’s American. The tourist board’ll go nuts.

Yeah, fine. The fucking tourist board. Look, do what you want. I don’t actually give a shit one way or the other, the whole fuckin’ island’s a fuckin’ monkey house. I’m outa here tonight anyhow.

He moves for the exit and then to me he says, Kid, if you’re smart you’ll go back to Doc’s house and you’ll stay put there till you grow up. If you was one of Doc’s black kids you’d be dead meat by now. I don’t give a shit myself. Next time you might not be so lucky.

I go, Thanks for the advice, man, and he shook his head like he’d gotten real sick of me fast and disappeared into the next chamber. Nighthawk lowered his Uzi and followed him. When Jason got to the door he turned back and said, See you up on de hill, mon, and gave me a toothy smile that actually looked friendly and was gone.

After I couldn’t hear the American and Nighthawk and Jason anymore and figured by now they’d found their way out I stood up and brushed myself off. I pretty much knew by then what I was going to find but I went looking for it anyhow. I headed for the rooms way at the back where I myself would’ve run if three guys like these’d showed up with guns and no plans to pay me for my services. In one of the rooms when I pushed the curtain away I saw poor old Prince Shabba lying facedown in a pool of blood with a bunch of holes in his back where the Uzi’d really ripped him up.

I stepped around his body and went into the next room and there against the far wall was I-Man sitting on the sandy floor all slumped over with his skinny little legs sticking out and his eyes and mouth open. His face was empty inside though. I-Man was gone, flown off to Africa. There was a jagged hole in the center of his forehead and a whole lot of blood running down the bamboo wall behind his head into the sand. Oh man, it was a horrible sight. Especially that single dark blue bullet hole which I could see had been put there by Jason’s niner.

You can understand if I just keep talking here, okay?

I didn’t know what to do then. I wasn’t scared or anything although I probably should’ve been. All I wanted was to get out of there, to get as far from the ant farm as I could, so I could think about everything and try to make sense of my feelings and thoughts which at that moment were the most mixed up they had ever been in my life. Somehow the whole terrible thing felt like it was my fault and there was no way left for me now to make it right.

When I got back out to the yard I-Man’s box was sitting on the ground finally silent and dead as ol’ I-Man himself. I picked it up and put it on my shoulder and took up I-Man’s Jah-stick and walked back up the path to the road where the Benz’d been parked and started hiking in the direction of Mobay. It didn’t make me feel any better to think of I-Man as flown off to Africa. Actually when it came right down to it, like now, I didn’t believe any of that shit.