Rule of the Bone (27 page)
They're carrying machetes too, plus scythes and sickles and hatchets and they quickly brush past me following I-Man and the other Maroons toward the greathouse. I want to follow them but something stops me, like my feet are suddenly made of lead and I can't walk so I have to stand there in the bushy shadows at the edge of the big wide lawn and watch the blacks enter the darkened house at all the entrances, front and back and side. Except for the steady drumming which I'm totally used to by now like it's my own heartbeat and the sound of the wind off the sea clattering the moonlit palms it's completely silent. I stand there for a long time wondering if maybe I was dreaming, when I hear a shriek that makes my blood go cold followed by screams and someone, a woman wailing for a second until she's abruptly shut off and then a white man is begging, No, no, please don't! and he's cut off too. Then silence again. Until I hear some glass breaking inside and then I notice someone, a child creeping on hands and knees across the porch in front. It's a blond-haired white boy barefoot in a nightgown, like five or six years old and he makes his way along the length of the porch and climbs down to the ground there and starts running straight toward where I'm standing. He comes up suddenly on me all wild-eyed and pumping his arms and legs like mad and just as he's about to pass me by I reach out and grab him and clap my hand over his shocked mouth and pull him back into the shadowy bushes and hold on to him tight.
A minute later I can see flames flaring up at the back of the house and up on the second floor somebody's smashing the windows and tossing stuff out, books fluttering down and dishes and piss pots and a tailor's dummy. The drapes on the first floor are on fire now and I can see black people with their machetes and so on coming out of the house and gathering together on the far side. Me and the white kid who's shivering in my arms back off a few more steps into the bushes as the blacks check each other out and then start running. There's about twenty or thirty of them waving bloody machetes and hatchets as they cross the great wide lawn in the moonlight headed toward a grove of live oak trees and a long sloping field where the cows are kept. The house is really on fire now, huge sprays of sparks're flying up and the sky is glowing orange and yellow.
Behind me the long driveway curves away to the road by the sea and I see in the distance the first of the white men on horseback coming with a second batch a short ways behind. The blacks have disappeared into the cow field and beyond the field is the woods and then the hills and beyond the hills is the Cockpit. There's no one left here now, no one alive but me and the little blond-haired white kid sobbing in my arms. And here come the white men riding up the driveway like mad with guns and swords glinting in the moonlight ready to slay the first black they see. They're hungry for killing a black and spattering his blood and no little white kid is going to be strong enough to save him.
Suddenly someone touches me on the shoulder and I turn and it's I-Man. He says, Comin', Bone?
What about him? I say and show him the little white kid.
Forget-tee, Bone.
Practically crying I say, Oh Rasta, I-and-I cyan't do dat! Up to you, Bone, he says and he walks off toward the bush and disappears into the darkness.
I unwrap my arms from the white boy and release him and instantly he takes off running toward the men on horseback who have arrived in front of the house now and are shouting and firing their guns into the air looking crazy and wild until they see the kid. The head white man gets down off his horse real fast and sweeps the boy up in his arms, and right away the kid points straight at where I'm hiding in the bushes. The little bastard betrays me! The head white guy starts jogging toward me with his gun out ready to blow me away and several others come up behind him so I take off running, darting down behind the barns and the sugar factory where I scramble over a stone fence and plunge into the cane field there with bullets flying over my head and zipping through the cane snapping off stalks as I plow ahead like in a green endless head high sea of sugarcane expecting my next breath to be my last.
But it's not. Way out there in the middle of the cane field with my chest heaving and my legs almost too heavy to run another step I push away a clump of cane and see a hole in the ground. Quick as I can I check it out and observe that it goes a long ways in and is just big enough for a skinny kid like me to squeeze into but no regular white man can. I take one more look back at the greathouse which's all aflame now and the white guys're riding around it like they set it on fire themselves shooting their guns off in all directions even in mine still. Then I notice that a bunch of riders are torching the cane field on three sides and a bunch more are galloping their horses around to the fourth side by the road to wait there for me so I drop down on my hands and knees and crawl into the darkness of the hole in the ground.
I'm surprised and a little scared to find that the hole just keeps going, it's a tunnel and pretty soon it's pitch dark and I can't hear the gunfire and the roar of the fires and the white guys yelling anymore, all I can hear is the drumming, the same drumming as before only it's getting louder now as I crawl along the tunnel feeling my way with my hands out in front of my face. I squirm and crawl like this for hours it seems like and all the time the drums keep getting louder until finally I work my way around a sharp bend in the tunnel and up ahead I catch a glimpse of a flickering light and before I know it I've reached the end of the tunnel.
I pull myself forward and up out of it and when I stick my head up and look around I see that I've come out in the candlelit Maroon cave. I climb up out of the spinal cord hole at the rear of the skull and there's I-Man kicking back with a spliff and ol' Rubber's working out like a madman on one of those little square goatskin drums and the other Rastas, Terron and Elroy're rolling joints and everybody looks like even though they've been waiting patiently for me to get back they're relieved to see me and are ready to book. Rubber lays off the drumming and stands and stretches and the other guys do the same. Then I-Man blows out the candles one by one and leads the way back out through the mouth into the darkness.
Things moved pretty fast after that and I didn't really have time like for weeks, until I left Jamaica actually, for digesting the experience of coming to know I-self so to speak and how coming to see with the lights of I-self'd changed the way I saw everything else like it was supposed to do. And did. But the next few days we just worked all day and even at night harvesting the ganja plants, me and I-Man and the other guys cutting the plants with machetes on both plots, I-Man's and Rubber's next door and then hauling them up to my cabin where the drying racks were that they'd built out of bamboo, and then as soon as the plots were cleared we chopped up the dirt again with hoes and fertilized it with this powdery old bat-shit that we had to bag and lug from a cave a long ways into the Cockpit. It was hard work, harder than any I'd done before and you had to concentrate so I didn't have much time for thinking or remembering, especially because it was so hot all the time. My head was like that kid's I'd been in slavery days, pretty much a blank except I wasn't scared or nervous about anything anymore especially white people.
After we had the dirt ready we planted the seeds for the new crop and hauled water and got the rows real soppy and for shading them while the plants were still babies we ran strings from poles and hung these humongous thin camouflage sheets that I-Man said'd been left behind in Grenada after the United States Army finished invading and went home. Dem hiding sheets spread all over de Caribbean now, mon. Dem de bes' t'ing 'bout dat invasion so as t' mek de ganja reach him fulfillment undisturbed âneath de Jamaican sun an' den return to Babylon an' help create de peaceable kingdom dere. Jah mek de instruments of destruction come forward fe be instruments of
in
struction.
Then we spent days sorting the dried ganja plants and pressing and packing them into burlap bales, about a hundred of them that we stacked under a lean-to we built and inside my cabin so I had to move out practically and hang my hammock from a couple of trees out behind it. But only for a few days, I-Man explained. De Nighthawk soon come, he said referring I figured to some guy with a big truck because that was what he'd need for hauling this many bales out of here. I never asked much about the higher workings of the ganja trade, how it got financed and all, I just let I-Man tell me what he thought I needed to know which actually wasn't much since I was like a peon still and just did what I was told by the older heavier dudes in the posse. But I figured there were even heavier dudes in places like Kingston and Mobay or maybe the States who'd put up the money for the operation, for the camouflage sheets for instance and the plastic pails and hoes and all and for walking-around money since the only cash money I-Man or the other guys had came from dealing small load down in Mobay out of the ant farm. What they had going up here in the Cockpit was a major plantation though and that took cash no matter how much free labor we were putting in.
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 or 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.
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.