Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

I knew he was lying and if it hadn’t been for being possessed by I-Man I probably would’ve told him so but instead I said, Dat sword dere in de fire gwan kill you, Jason, gwan sattar in de fire till it red hot and den it rise up an’ fly ‘cross de air an’ chop off you head from you neck, mon. De sword of virtue it be an’ it gwan slay de liar an’ de hypocrite wit’ a single stroke!

I think he figured at that point I was looney-tunes and basically harmless because he laughed and grabbed the machete off the grill and now he had two machetes, one in each hand and he jumped up on top of the barbecue, not on the grill but on the cinderblocks around it which still must’ve been hot on his bare feet but he didn’t seem to mind. He was standing up there towering over me shirtless and in shorts with a machete in each hand and a wild crazy stoned look on his face. It was like a white man’s worst nightmare and if it hadn’t’ve been for I-Man still holding me under his control I’d’ve been outa there that second, no way I’m hanging around to discuss things, but instead the Jah-stick like takes on a life of its own and pulls itself forward in my hands and even though I’m yanking back on it trying to keep it from jabbing at Jason I can’t and the lion’s head at the top of the stick heads right for Jason’s face and jacks him in the eyes. He howls in pain and the machetes go clanking and he slips and falls onto the grill knocking the goat off the spit and burning the shit out of himself and now he’s really screaming in pain and I don’t know how to help him except by running around the barbecue to the other side and steering him as fast as I can down the steps toward the pool where the females are out in the middle with their hands over their mouths and looking on in horror as I push Jason into the pool.

And book. As fast as I can and without once looking back I race up the steps again and grab the Jah-stick and run full speed down the long driveway past all the sad little red-eyed rabbits and foxes and so on and through the gate to the lane and down the long hill past the cabins and houses of the local people who watch me and a few wave but I don’t wave back. I just keep on running.

And that’s about it, pretty much the whole story up to now. Except to tell how I got off of the island of Jamaica which is no big deal since it was basically pure luck.

The reason I’d decided to light out for the marina once I’d made my exit at Starport was I knew quite a few yachts and private charter boats came and went from there to all over the Caribbean and some of the captains of those boats weren’t too fussy who came and went with them so long as you were willing to work hard for bad food and no pay or almost none. How I knew this was I-Man’d done a little lunchtime dealing over the years with the various guys who worked in the boatyard and on the docks and he’d gotten to know the crews and even a few captains who made regular stops there for water and gas and other supplies, including Jamaican mountain-grown ganja for themselves and their customers too sometimes, the rich people who either owned the boats and just liked to ride around in them or the not-so-rich people on vacation who rented them.

Last summer before we fled into the hills of Accompong there’d been three or four times that me and I-Man’d made ganja deliveries at the marina and hung out there chatting up the customers like I-Man always did when he made a delivery. It was part of the service I guess, plus it was how he got information about the cops and so on and how he made new contacts for future sales. I used to think I-Man was too sociable in general and not such a hot dealer of weed, nothing like ol’ Hector the Spanish guy at Chi-Boom’s in Plattsburgh say, but later I came to view him as one of the best, actually the best I’d ever known.

Anyhow up at the Mothership that night while I was sitting alone on the cot in the laundry room making up my escape plans I’d suddenly remembered this one guy named Captain Ave from Key West, Florida originally who ran this charter boat called Belinda Blue out of Mobay and was a regular customer of I-Man’s. Belinda Blue was a short fat commercial fishing boat from Maine or someplace that he’d like converted for taking people on two-week-long charter cruises to the various islands, families mostly and honeymooning couples and suchlike who’d thought when they signed on that a boat named Belinda Blue that they had to fly down to meet in Montego Bay, Jamaica would turn out to be one of those sleek three-masted schooners like you see in magazines. I think maybe Captain Ave misled them too, with pictures of other guys’ boats and had gotten in trouble doing the same thing in the States and that was the real reason why he worked out of Montego Bay instead of Miami or Key West.

The point is Captain Ave who was a decent enough guy himself usually had seriously pissed-off customers who thought they’d been cheated and like anyone they took it out on the crew who on these kind of boats have to be like the servants. Which meant he had a hard time keeping his crew and was always looking for new guys. That was the word around the marina at least, and Captain Ave himself once when me and I-Man dropped off a couple ounces told me he always needed an extra hand and if I ever felt like doing a little island-hopping I should look him up. He asked me did I have any experience and I said sure, I’d spent a lot of time on the frigid waters of Lake Champlain which I admitted wasn’t exactly the Atlantic Ocean but they had a lot of big boats and ferries and so on there and I could crew, sure.

Okay, anytime, kid, he said. I think he sensed I was pretty good at bullshitting white people which was something he definitely needed on the Belinda Blue. But back then I was still newly arrived in Jamaica and was employed full time at the ant farm as I-Man’s apprentice and was totally turned off by the idea of serving food and cocktails at sunset and doing laundry for rich white Americans too pissed off to lighten up because they’d expected to be cruising the warm romantic waters of the Caribbean on a white-sailed windjammer instead of a fat wallowing old tub which was pretty comfortable actually and cool the way Captain Ave’d fixed it up with bunks and a galley and all, even two staterooms, he called them.

Now though everything was different. I was nobody’s apprentice now. When I finally got down off the hill and stepped off the bus from Montpelier in front of the marina it was dark and I was hoping the gate hadn’t been locked yet, and it hadn’t. And when I ran through the open gate into the marina and made my way down the crisscrossing docks where all the boats were tied up I was hoping I’d see the Belinda Blue where it used to be, I was hoping hoping hoping, and it was. All I had to hope for then was that Captain Ave’d need another guy to crew for him and that the Belinda Blue was set to go out real soon, before Jason or any of his coworkers or even Doc found out where I’d gone. On an island like Jamaica you can hide all right from the rest of the world but you can’t hide from the people who live there.

Captain Ave was loading cases of beer and soft drinks aboard by himself and when I walked up and asked did he need any help he said, Yeah, stash this shit below and c’mon aboard, kid, and we’ll talk. Which I did and a little while later we were sitting in the stern doing business. It turned out that a husband and wife and their two little kids were flying in from New York City tomorrow to take the Belinda Blue to this island called Dominica where they’d rented a house for a few weeks, sort of a month-long surf-and-turf family vacation that this phony New York rental agent Captain Ave knew had cooked up for them. Nobody at the marina wanted to crew for Captain Ave as usual and for the usual reasons, I knew although he didn’t say that, but also because it was a one-way cruise with no guaranteed return trip.