Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

The husband was supposed to be this famous singer from the sixties who’d kicked drugs and booze and got married and had kids et cetera and become like a regular citizen but I wasn’t even born until 1979 so I’d never heard of him. Captain Ave thought that was weird but he was a sixties guy. The beers I’d been lugging below were for Captain Ave and his crew, he said because the cruise was supposed to be drug and alcohol free. He was pretty disgusted by the whole thing. Plus he’d just found out the whole family were vegetarians which he said he didn’t know from Unitarians. Can you handle that? he asked me and I said sure, I’ll cook Ital. He said fine so long as he didn’t have to eat that shit. Then we agreed I’d get two hundred bucks when we got to Dominica and we shook hands.

We each drank a beer over it and afterwards he showed me where the crew bunked. It was way up in the bow of the boat and tiny like a pointed coffin with no window and two foot-wide benches with sponge rubber mattresses for sleeping on. I was glad then that I was the only member of the crew and decided that unless it rained I’d be sleeping up on the topdeck anyhow and proceeded to haul one of the chunks of sponge rubber up there and lay down on it and probably due to the excitement of the last few days plus relief for having found a way out of Jamaica I didn’t have any thoughts left and almost instantly fell asleep.

There’s only one other thing that happened to me in Jamaica worth telling about. Not because it’s so interesting but it’s kind of sad. In the morning Captain Ave who had to go meet the singer and his family at the airport gave me a bunch of money and dropped me off at the Mobay market to buy enough veggies to get us to Dominica. Get about a week’s worth, he said, and bring me the change plus receipts. No problema, I said although I wasn’t too happy about making any public appearances so to speak especially at the marketplace where I’d stand out and certain people I knew did their food shopping. Still, Captain Ave didn’t know about my various adventures and I couldn’t tell him so I did what he asked and went around to the different stands buying breadfruits and akee and calalu and coconuts and various fruits, the usual components of an Ital menu which was basically all I knew how to cook anyhow. Him and me he said could eat the fish we caught and there’d be several islands we’d stop at along the way where we could get regular American food which was fine by me since I hadn’t had any in a long time.

I was pretty close to finished and was buying this huge bag of oranges from a lady when I looked up and spotted a white person in the crowd on the other side of the market and even though I hadn’t seen him since the Ridgeways’ I recognized him at once. It was Russ. He looked the same at first except I could tell he was really confused and scared especially by all the black people whose native language he probably couldn’t understand a word of. For a minute there I had to fight off a desire to rush over and help him but I quickly overcame it and ducked down behind the fat lady selling the oranges and peeked out under her table at him. Russ’s eyes were darting around and he was licking his lips a lot and kept pushing his hair off his forehead. He was trying to seem cool. He had on a sleeveless shirt and cutoffs and black high-top Doc Martens and no socks and he’d cut his hair with a buzz on the sides and a rattail in back. I noticed then that he had a bunch more tattoos, all over his arms and legs even, all kinds of snakes and different-colored dragons and various slogans. They were pretty much everywhere. He looked really pathetic and I wished we could still be friends but it was definitely too late.

His eyes were like cruising the marketplace crowd, for me no doubt since I hadn’t been at the clock tower where I’d promised but then I saw he’d locked onto something and I followed his gaze across the crowd to a group of three whites, females they were, Evening Star and her campers Rita and Dickie. Evening Star being the experienced Jamaican shopper and all was pointing to this and that and explaining everything to the other two who were like nodding and being politely amazed. Russ though was already zeroing in on them like a teenaged heat-seeking missile. I really had to fight with myself to keep from standing up and waving my arms and hollering, Russ! Don’t, Russ! Come with me to Dominica, Russ!

But it was too late even for that. Evening Star’d picked him out of the crowd and was already smiling in his direction and he was smiling back and I knew was rehearsing in his mind the line he’d use. He’d say like, You guys come here often? and she’d say, Every Saturday, darlin’, and he’d say, Wow, you must live here, I’m new in town, just arrived from the States and looking for my homey named Chappie who was s’posed to meet me blah blah blah, and the rest would be as predictable as the first part.

I watched for a few minutes more while Russ and Evening Star yakked it up. Then she introduced him to her friends from Boston and turned aside and said something private to Russ which was probably that her friends were lesbians and which knowing Russ would turn him on and knowing Evening Star that was the point of telling him. Anyhow a second later he was carrying their groceries for them and talking like they were all old friends and I figured it wouldn’t take more than another few minutes for Evening Star to realize that Chappie, Russ’s homey from upstate New York was the very boy she’d known as Bone. And in an hour Russ’d have a blunt-sized spliff in his mouth and be doing the backstroke in the pool at Starport.

They strolled toward the parking lot and I finally stood up and watched them get into Evening Star’s Range Rover and drive off. Poor ol’ Russ, I thought. I wished I could’ve saved him. But I knew that even if I’d tried he wouldn’t’ve let me. That could’ve been me, I thought, that poor bewildered kid in the Doc Martens and the rattail haircut with the painful-looking red and blue and black newly drilled tattoos all over his pink skin climbing into the fancy car and riding up the hill to the greathouse, a stoner boy amazed at his incredible luck and looking forward already to getting coked with some weird dude named Doc on the patio before the sun goes down and laid by this buff older chick named Evening Star in the laundry room before it comes up again.

It would’ve been me, if it hadn’t been for Sister Rose and I-Man and everything I’d learned about myself and life from coming to love them out there at the schoolbus in Plattsburgh and being with I-Man afterwards at the ant farm and up on the groundation in Accompong. I’d even loved big bad Bruce because he’d died trying to save me from the fire in Au Sable and that’d taught me a lot too. They were the only three people I’d chosen on my own to love, and they were gone. But still, that morning in Mobay when I saw Russ for the last time, I saw clearly for the first time that loving Sister Rose and I-Man and even Bruce had left me with riches that I could draw on for the rest of my life, and I was totally grateful to them.

* * *

We cast off from the marina at around four that afternoon and headed in bright sunshine and a light breeze for open water. From the galley I could look out onto the foredeck while I was working and watch the kids Josh and Rachel who were supposed to be twins but they didn’t look anything alike and I wondered if they were adopted because neither of them resembled the parents either. Josh was moon-faced and blond and freckled and Rachel was dark and curly-haired and wore glasses and was taller than her brother. They were maybe eight or nine, spoiled rich kids I suppose but basically decent and surprisingly considerate to each other, considering they didn’t get much out of their parents one way or the other.