Rule of the Bone

FIFTEEN. SUNSPLASHED

Even though it was summertime our fellow passengers after the Miami airport anyhow were mostly tourists I guess taking advantage of bargain rates which is how the one guy who was sitting next to me explained it when I asked him why he was going to Jamaica now instead of waiting for winter.

It’s off season, kid. Cheapereno, he said. Plus it’s a package. Which means you don’t have to leave the hotel for anything You know what I’m saying? Whatever you want, they got it right there at the hotel. You get me, kid? he says like wink-wink nudge-nudge.

Yeah but don’t you want to travel around some? You know, like maybe get out and see the country, do some trampoosing, man.

Naw. We’re comin’ to party!

Meaning him and about thirty or forty of the others on the plane who all had these couch-potato bodies and big hair and wore acid-washed designer jeans and tanktops, both the guys and the females who were about half of the group. Some of them were already wearing these straw hats they’d gotten in the airport. Miller-timers I call them. People who don’t like to leave home without their ice chest.

Jamaica’s a long ways for a party, I said.

He goes, Yeah! like that’s the point. They looked like they were into getting seriously laid a lot and by black people if possible and smoking some heavy reefer and snorting coke only they were too uptight to do it in America so I didn’t push it. I guess you do what you can where you can.

They were older singles in their twenties and thirties from Indiana and I think they all lived in the same condo development and had cheesy jobs like in malls and I guess they didn’t travel much because when the plane landed even though it was dark down there and you couldn’t see anything out the window yet except the lights of Jamaica which are the same as the lights of anywhere they all clapped and cheered and hollered Yes-s-sss! and All right!

The guy beside me pumped his fist and grinned and said, Let the games begin!

Go for the gold, man, I said and pulled my backpack and I-Man’s flight bag and boom box down from the overhead bin and brought I-Man his Jah-stick from where the lady had asked him to stow it up front and he’d said no problem. Up to now I’d never even been as far as Albany and here I was like in a foreign country which the first time can be a real shock to the system. Except I was with I-Man who even though he was a foreigner to most people to me he was my homeboy practically and my spiritual guide and on his native ground now so I could be cool and just follow along behind him like I was only going to Albany instead of Jamaica and I went there all the time.

When we’d stopped off and the plane was waiting I guess for gas in Miami me and I-Man’d walked around the airport a little and took a piss and so on and watched the Indiana party animals so it wasn’t like we were actually anywhere then except normal America where it’s mostly white people running things. But when we got off the plane in Jamaica it was real different. All the people in charge were black for starters and that can throw you off if you’re an American. I was pretty used to that from hanging with I-Man of course but it was weird to see my fellow white Americans getting suddenly all nervous and loud and dumb like they couldn’t read the signs and the black people couldn’t speak English.

They were scared I guess and when they were getting their suitcases off of the conveyor belt they started yelling and grabbing their stuff and dropping it and generally fucking up so the Jamaican airport guys had to pay a lot of attention to them to get them to go where they were supposed to for having their bags checked for drugs and such and for getting their papers stamped. Plus it was really hot even though it was night and everybody was sweating like mad which they weren’t used to and which I think pissed them off like they’d expected the whole country to be air-conditioned. Me and I-Man already had our bags and didn’t have any papers to get stamped on account of I-Man’d said not to bother filling them out when they gave them to us on the plane. No need fe deal wi’ Babylon, Bone, he’d said when I asked the guy next to me for his pen when he was through. Forget-tee, he said which was one of his favorite words. Forget-tee.

Now though I wasn’t so sure with all these soldiers and customs guys checking everybody out but I just followed I-Man and his magic Jah-stick as he stepped away from the Americans struggling to find their bags and crossed the room to this one guy who stood by the gate and looked like he was the head customs guy, this big potbellied black dude with sunglasses and a mustache and a toothpick in his mouth and a clipboard in his hand.

He would’ve been the main guy to avoid if I’d’ve been alone but I-Man just comes right up on him and they start talking in Jamaican which I’d never heard I-Man do before, he’d always talked English before which I’d thought was his native language. But they have this other native language that they only use with their fellow Jamaicans. It has quite a lot of English words in it but it’s mostly African I think. I got so eventually I could understand it pretty good but the first few times I heard it they could’ve been jabbering in French or Russian for all I knew.

Anyhow from what I could figure the customs guy and I-Man were like true homeys or something because after they exchanged views for a few minutes he just waved us through this separate little gate and we’re suddenly out in the main part of the airport which is open to the street and there’s all these Jamaicans with vans and taxis waiting, fifty or a hundred of them, some with hotel signs and even buses waiting and a whole bunch of women carrying huge trays of souvenirs and Jamaican shirts and straw hats and so on and some skinny kids standing around ready to panhandle or whatever and these tall cool dudes in sunglasses even though it’s night with short natty locks and their belts undone and their flies half open, evil-looking guys who’re probably coke dealers or just trying to look generally available for white chicks from Indiana and everybody’s watching the gates and waiting to pounce as soon as they see a regular American come out. There were some cops too in striped short-sleeved shirts and blue pants who were mainly watching the Jamaican civilians, probably to keep them from scaring the party animals when they came out and realized that they hadn’t been safely herded inside their hotel yet.

Me and I-Man though, we were like invisible I guess because nobody even noticed us. We walked past everyone down the crowded road to the main road where I-Man turned left and then we walked at a good clip away from the airport into the darkness and suddenly we were surrounded by this strange silence although I thought I could hear waves of the ocean breaking off to our left a ways. I could tell from the lights behind us that the town which I guessed was Montego Bay was in the opposite direction so I said to I-Man, Where we headed now? and he goes, Not far, Bone. We gwan fine de lion in his kingdom.

That’s cool, I said. For a long time though we kept walking along the side of the road. Now and then I could see the light of a house in the distance and here came a bus or a car that blew by and I could hear a dog bark sometimes. Otherwise darkness and except for the sound of our sandals and the click of I-Man’s Jah-stick against the pavement, silence. I had about a thousand more questions to ask but I knew I wouldn’t’ve understood the answers, it was still too soon so I just marched along behind I-Man and didn’t say anything. I was like a clueless newbie. It was incredibly hot and the air was soft and really wet, it smelled like woodsmoke and curried ocean water or something which was a whole new smell to me, strange and not a good one either and I’m thinking like maybe I’m on a different planet than the one I originally came from, maybe I’m actually the pod boy from earth not Mars and for the first time since the plane took off in Vermont which was the first time in my life I’d done that I got really scared, I’m thinking like maybe I won’t be able to breathe right, maybe there’s too much oxygen here or maybe there’s some weird Jamaican marsh gas in the air and it’s fine for I-Man, he’s got gills or whatever but me, on account of growing up in New York State and all I’m not physically equipped to do this. Travel is good for you, I kept saying to myself, it broadens you and extends your horizons et cetera but way down deep I was wishing I was back in Plattsburgh in the schoolbus again, just another homeless northcountry mall rat dodging the cops and copping a J now and then and spare-changing my way from day to day until my mom finally saw the light and split from Ken so I could go home and grow up living with her as her son again.

Just then I-Man turned off the road and went down into like a ditch and over a low rock fence. There was a little moonlight now and I could see this goat standing on the fence gazing at us with these glazed pale eyes and I watched back because I’d only seen goats in pictures before and didn’t know if they bite. Come, Bone, I-Man said so I followed him and the goat didn’t do anything.

It turned out we were on this path that cut through some palm tree woods and pretty soon we were down on the beach walking along on the sand. There were waves coming in, these strange low peaceful kinds of waves, not surfer waves like you’d’ve thought from it being a real ocean and suddenly the clouds broke open and a big silver moon came out and I could see a little of where I was then, on a long strand of beach with a tangled hedge of low bushes on one side and silhouetted palm trees in back like on a postcard and mountains humped up behind and the water was dark and velvety soft in the moonlight and the clouds got all bright and were edged like in melted silver. It was wicked beautiful.

Now that same warm soft wet air seemed totally natural to me and the smell was like a flowery perfume instead of like somebody’d just pissed on a woodfire and I wasn’t wishing I could go back to Plattsburgh anymore. I was reminding myself that with I-Man and Sister Rose gone and Russ making it in the straight world I’d be all alone up there and pretty soon it’d start getting cold again and the snow would come cruising in from Canada and all the plants and vegetables in I-Man’s groundation would freeze and die and I’d probably start getting into panhandling for crack I’d be so bummed from that kind of life and it’d be downhill from there for sure. And my mom I knew wasn’t going to see the light. No way. No, I was definitely going to have to become a brand-new beggar. Just like I-Man said.

* * *

After a while we ended up cutting off from the beach and went back into the bushes on a zigzaggy path I’d’ve never seen on my own if I hadn’t been following I-Man. Finally we came to this bamboo fence with a gate that had a red and green and gold lion’s head painted on it and when we went through the gate there was this little sandy yard and then I-Man picked up a candle from a shelf beside a door and lit it and went through the door into a bamboo cave which was actually a house, this incredible house with high steep ceilings that were thatched like in Africa and walls built entirely out of bamboo tied together with vines and there were all these little circular rooms and hallways going off of each other in a hundred different directions like an ant farm I once made for school.

The rooms had bunches of huge pillows placed around the walls for sitting on like in a harem and hammocks for sleeping in and low tables and curtains made out of beads hanging at the doors and pictures of Rasta heroes on the walls like Marcus Garvey who I-Man said was the first Jamaican to figure out how to get back to Africa and Martin Luther King who I recognized on my own and an African king in a suit named Mandela I-Man told me when I said who’s that and of course the head Rasta, Haile Selassie himself, Negus of Bathsheba, Emperor of Ethiopia, Jah Rastafar-i. I was learning a lot.

Except for the pictures and the pillows and hammocks and the bead curtains everything else in the house was handmade including the picture frames out of bamboo. It was like Bamboo World, a Rasta theme park and definitely the coolest squat I’d ever seen. It really blew me away so I go, This is cool, man, which sounded so stupid I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Plattsburgh, New York, that’s where I belonged.

Lion in his kingdom fear no one, Bone. Nyah Bingh in his kingdom, twelve tribe in his kingdom, Bobo in his kingdom, he’s like chanting from a pillow where he’d sat down and was now filling the biggest best bong I’d ever seen from a huge bowl of ganja. No matter where we go, we de lion in his kingdom. Sattar, Bone, an’ smoke from de chalice.

He was off on a Rasta-rap, a kind of homecoming high I guess and I could dig that even though it sort of weirded me out, by now everything else was so different from my previous life that there probably wasn’t much left that could make me freak and besides I was interested in doing a load myself so I said, This is like your squat, right? Your Jamaican crib? And nobody else knows about it?

He was pulling these huge draws in by now, his head surrounded by spiraling clouds of smoke, the chalice bubbling and burping away and I was already lifted just from the secondhand smoke. He goes, I-and-I gots to be smart to prevent dem from tumble down on I-and-I. People of de world who see I-works an’ know of I wants to tumble down on I, backbiters — dem wants to tumble down on I, criticism — dem wants to tumble down on I, badminded — dem wants to tumble down on I…

That’s excellent, man. Lemme have a hit, I said and he handed me the chalice and off I go, more toasted in a few seconds than I actually want to be and suddenly I’m scared of losing my brains which almost never happens to me when I smoke so I tried to fake it by not inhaling so much and handed the chalice back to I-Man who was lying back on the pillow across from me a few seconds ago only he was gone now but it was too late, I was flying, the harem room was flying, the bamboo ant farm was flying, the whole world was flying through the known and unknown universe into like deep space where no boy has dared to boldly go before. I thought I saw I-Man but he turned into this tall Rasta guy I’d never seen before with dreads tied up like a huge soft bow on his head and there were a couple of other Rastas who walked past all drifty and mellow and I could hear reggae tunes coming from someplace sometimes real loud with words and chants and then just the heavy beat real quiet and no words and pretty soon it was silent.

I was slumped over sitting on one of the pillows watching the candle flame when suddenly this spider came drifting down from the ceiling and hovered over the flame for a minute and then like it’d gotten too hot the spider started trying to climb back up on its web. It struggled and fought but it was too late, the web turned into a gold wire and the spider lost it and dropped onto the flame where it got instantly crisped and its tiny ashy body floated up on the heat a ways and then it disappeared into thin air.

I was almost crying then. I’d done it, I’d moved the candle under the spider on purpose, it was all my fault. I tried to stand up but couldn’t so I crawled around the room on my hands and knees like a baby looking for I-Man and then down this dark hallway thinking maybe if I could find a peaceful corner I could curl up in with my back to the wall nothing could sneak up and surprise me, goats or lions or avenging spiders but the hall kept curving around until finally I came to a door and pushed it open and I was outside in the sandy yard and the sky was clear and there were millions of stars swimming overhead like fish in schools or birds flying in flocks and the moon was splashing everything on earth with this dry white powder like flour.

I could stand up now so I did and managed to get to the gate in the bamboo fence and out and then I let my feet kind of lead me along the path in the general direction of the ocean which I could locate okay from the sound of the waves until I came out on the beach and plopped down there on the white sand and just watched the waves coming in over and over friendly and slow and no surprises until my heart stopped pounding and I wasn’t breathing so hard and fast anymore. I didn’t think I could find my way back to the ant farm again, I actually didn’t want to go back there yet so I decided to just chill on the beach for the night and wait till daylight to figure out what to do next. I was totally bummed. This was a new kind of lonliness for me. It made me want to stay away from people forever.

That didn’t last, naturally. The next morning I’m sitting on the beach watching this atomic sunrise going on way out at the horizon beyond the gray ocean with sheets of red and yellow and pink clouds going nuts out there and the water all streaky like with blood which is definitely not what you see at dawn in upstate New York after blasting your brains on skunk the night before, and suddenly there was I-Man squatting down beside me. I was real glad to see his familiar brown face, like it was a relative’s face and I didn’t feel lonely anymore.

He put his hand on my shoulder and said he had some food fe strengthen de structure and fe repair de damage from our long journey out of Babylon so I followed him back up to the ant farm where there were these other Rastas squatting around on their heels in the yard smoking spliffs and makin’ chat as I-Man says who he introduced me to, Fattis and Buju and Prince Shabba that he said were his posse.

Prince Shabba I recognized from the night before on account of his humongous bowtie hairdo and the other two were kind of familiar too. They were younger than I-Man, in their thirties or forties maybe, it’s hard to tell because they were skinny dudes and their huge long dreads were kind of distracting and white people even me have trouble telling the age of black adults except by their clothes until they’re really up there like I-Man. They talked to each other in their native language so I didn’t catch much of what they were saying and basically they ignored me, even I-Man which was cool because I figured I’d be smart to just hang and watch and learn what I could before branching out on my own again because these dudes who were basically different from me inside as much as out were also very well adapted to their environment which gave me a good idea of the danger I was in every time I took what I thought was an innocent step.

Like their environment was now mine and the ant farm was definitely not some package-tour hotel for Miller-timers from Indiana. So I just did what I-Man told me, ate when he said and what he said, drank what he gave me and only took real light nips of kali off of the chillum pipe when he passed it over to me and kept the spliffs moving down the line like I had plenty at home for later. No more buster-freak for Bone.

I-Man’s posse was a little like the men of Adirondack Iron except more mellow and at first I thought nonviolent until sometimes they’d be rapping and sucking on a chillum and they’d get all psyched from telling stories which I couldn’t understand and suddenly Fattis or Prince Shabba’d whip out an actual razor-sharp machete and start chopping the air with these vicious swipes and everybody’d laugh and holler like crazy. By then I knew enough of the language that I could tell they were talking about chopping people’s heads off and suchlike. Level de devil wid de bevel! Prince Shabba’d yell and he’d whack his machete into a coconut and split it in half.

And just like the bikers the Rastas didn’t seem to have any regular jobs or families at least not at the ant farm and they spent most of their time hanging and getting high and fixing up the ant farm the way the bikers used to work on their hogs and instead of listening to headbang the Rastas were into constantly playing reggae on I-Man’s box which they called his master-blaster until the batteries ran out and then the same way the bikers used to send me and Russ out for pizza they’d send Fattis or Buju who was the youngest I guess into town for more batteries although I didn’t know yet what they did for money unless I-Man was spending what was left of Buster’s stash. Which was cool by me. I didn’t want it for myself, that’s for sure. I wanted it gone completely and batteries for I-Man’s blaster seemed a harmless way to make it disappear.

We ate mainly stuff they cut off of the trees with their machetes and dug out of the ground and cooked over a fire in the yard, breadfruits which look like grapefruits only taste like bread and akee which are kind of like scrambled eggs when you cook them and your standard hairy green coconuts which they grind up the meat of and mix with everything and these long bananas you cut up and fry called plantains and soursops which’re sweet and creamy inside like custard and regular oranges and these long white yams and calalu and so on, a whole garden of excellent tropical food that grew around the ant farm among the trees and bushes in the same kind of screwy wandering garden as I-Man’d planted in the field around the schoolbus only here it seemed more natural.

Sometimes we’d all go down to the beach and swim and they’d wash their dreadlocks and rub these green leaves all over them afterwards that left them shiny and black as licorice and then the posse’d play this game with a paddle and ball called cricket that was like baseball only slower and more like dancing and originally came from Africa I think although they threw the ball and hit it and caught it and ran back and forth more like a bunch of antelopes than crickets unless they have those kind there that leap about and run and stop. I-Man was good at what they called bowling and they always let him go first and he’d bowl for a long time only it was overhand and upside down from the kind of bowling I knew.

Quite a few different people came by the ant farm, fellow Rastas and some regular Jamaicans and even a few Chinese guys and a couple of buff females one time who’d hang and smoke for an hour or two and then split and pretty soon I came to understand that I-Man and his posse were doing some serious ganja dealing on the side which explained a few things. They had like tubs of it stashed in the back rooms of the ant farm and they moved it in these paper bags like it was rice a pound at a time it looked like. The ant farm was a factory outlet for ganja and for a heavy pot smoker hanging there with I-Man and the posse was like dying and going to heaven except I was pretty cautious now due to so many things surprising me every day and only took my toke when it would’ve been weird or embarrassing not to.

I was getting my picture of I-Man slightly revised you might say. I’d even seen some guns by now, Prince Shabba had one, a.45 I think and so did I-Man which he kept in his old flight bag that he took with him everywhere and of course the flashing machetes which these guys treated real casual like they were Swiss Army knives or something. Plus quite a lot of money was being passed around including to and from cops. One night the same potbellied dude who’d let me and I-Man walk through customs at the airport without checking came by the ant farm and left with a free pound of primo boom loaded with buds like he’d phoned in his order ahead. And there were the same cool dudes with their flies open as I’d noticed at the airport who came around every few days for a load and I pictured their customers the Miller-timers rolling joints in their hotel rooms getting too choked to think and paranoid and all and I almost felt sorry for them.

I-Man and Prince Shabba and Fattis came and went from the ant farm a lot, making home deliveries I guess or bill collecting and whenever I-Man left the premises he took his blue bag and his Jah-stick and looked like a priest going on a pilgrimage. He was cool and I was proud to be under his protection which is basically how people treated me. Mostly though I did chores like sweeping the yard every day and lugging water with Buju from this spigot pipe up by the road where a lot of other Jamaicans came for their water with plastic buckets and pans, women and little half-naked kids and some wicked good-looking teenaged girls who I didn’t dare talk to or anything so me and Buju’d chat while our buckets filled about how he was going to Miami soon to work cutting cane or New York and pick apples like I-Man’d done and buy stuff. Not, I figured. He was like into video cameras and VCRs and big-screen TVs and so on that he wouldn’t’ve been able to even use at the ant farm on account of there being no electricity but he thought everything ran on batteries.

He wasn’t much older than me and on the dim side but friendly and he had a good singing voice and knew all the reggae songs from I-Man’s box but I still couldn’t understand the words so I didn’t talk much, I mainly listened. I think except for I-Man they thought I was on the dim side myself, especially for a white American kid but it doesn’t hurt for people to think you’re not as bright as you are when you don’t know all the rules yet.

Then this one afternoon Prince Shabba was gone off to Kingston or someplace and Fattis was asleep and Buju was making mugs out of bamboo for drinking and I-Man wanted to head out fe deal wi’ de brethren so he said for me to come along too. Come see de sights of Jamaica, Bone.

Cool, I said and off we went through the bushes to the road where we caught a bus crammed full of regular Jamaicans and rode about five or six miles into Mobay which is their word for Montego Bay, this fairly big town the size of Plattsburgh only a lot more crowded. I didn’t know for sure how long I’d been at the ant farm, two or three weeks maybe but a long time so when I started seeing white people like you do here and there on the streets of Mobay or in cars they really stood out and looked like extra-terrestrials with their chalky skin and long narrow noses and scrappy hair and I kept checking them out like I wasn’t one myself on account of how weird they looked, even the quick jerky way they walked and how they waved their hands but not their arms when they talked and how they didn’t get right up in each other’s face and all when they met like I was used to by now but stood back a ways and talked from a distance.

The streets were hot and crowded and muddy from a morning shower and where we got off the bus there were ten or twenty more buses unloading crowds of people with big burlap-wrapped bags of stuff, vegetables and fruits and even animals like chickens and pigs and goats and I saw that we were at this huge outdoor marketplace jammed with tables all loaded up with different kinds of goods, everything from rubber flip-flops and canned Spam to sugarcane and huge yams the size of your arm. It was the Jamaican equivalent of a mall I guess, with a special emphasis on food. And just like in a regular mall people were into socializing and hanging out and eating these little meat pies you can hold in your hand like tacos and sucking on stalks of sugarcane and cruising each other for different things from sex to gossip I guess or drugs.

I-Man I soon realized was making his regular once-a-week deliveries to people who probably lived too far from the ant farm or were too busy to come there in person. He was carrying a dozen or so one-pound bricks of grade A sinsemilla inside his old flight bag and he’d come up on some guy selling green parrots in homemade cages and they’d rap for a few minutes about this and that and then he’d just pull out the ganja which was wrapped in brown paper and pass it over in plain sight of the cops who were all around the place. The parrot guy’d say thanks and stash the dope under his table and count out the hundred and fifty bucks or whatever was the going wholesale price, something I could never quite figure since I never saw any scales or anything and they mostly used Jamaican money which I wasn’t used to yet. I figured I-Man and his posse were middlemen though, not producers and there was wholesale which they did mostly at the ant farm and there was retail which they did out here on the streets and the more you bought the less it cost per pound unless they didn’t know you or you were a rich white guy which I guess is the same free enterprise system as everywhere.

Speaking of money by now I wanted some of my own because of getting pissed from having to always bum cigarettes and beers and suchlike off of I-Man and the posse although nobody ever got uptight about it or anything due to the ant farm being like a commune and whenever I apologized for bumming another Craven A or a Red Stripe when the guys’d kick back over a few brewskies and cricket on the beach I-Man’d say, From each accordin’ to him ability, Bone, an’ to each accordin’ to him need. Which was irie with me except that without a little cash on hand my needs kept exceeding my abilities. My only previous work experience though was in dealing small-load dope and spare-changing neither of which was a useful skill here especially spare-changing. That is until at the marketplace in Mobay I started seeing all these white people mixed in with the Jamaicans.

So I split off from I-Man for a while and tried hitting on some sunburned tourist types wearing straw hats and carrying video cams and checking out the natives, male and female couples who sometimes are easier to spare-change because one of the two will try to harsh on the other for being too suspicious and he or usually she will give the poor kid a couple of quarters. I tried to look worried and scared and said I was on a class trip and my teacher and everybody else in the group’d left for Kingston in the van early without me and I just needed seventeen dollars to meet up with them or I’d miss the plane back to Connecticut and get left behind in Jamaica, which would’ve worked probably except that both the couples I hit on turned out to be German or Italian or something. They just shrugged and smiled and wagged their heads no comprendo until finally I gave up and held it my hand and said, Spare change, man? which I guess is universal because they said no loud and clear and acted disgusted that a white American boy’d act that way in front of all these poor starving Jamaicans.

I was wishing I’d run into some of the Indiana party animals who I figured would be relieved to buy some ganja from a white kid who spoke regular English instead of having to deal with a scary black Jamaican like I-Man, exploit my fellow Americans’ race thing in other words, and who knows, if it worked turn it into a regular job with I-Man and the posse, specializing in paranoid package tourists at the hotels. Having their own white kid on the stall so to speak’d give I-Man and the posse a definite advantage over the competition when it came to the tourist trade, I thought and then I wondered if I-Man’d already figured that out long ago, back in Plattsburgh even and had just eased me along without me knowing it, recruiting me and this was all a sort of apprenticeship in the ganja trade and if I came up believing it was my idea instead of his I’d never feel like he’d victimized me or anything or that he’d taken advantage of an innocent kid.

It wasn’t like Buster and Sister Rose. I mean, either way, whether it was my idea first or I-Man’s plan all along it didn’t matter once I was doing it because at any point along the way from the ferry ride across Lake Champlain to this morning in Mobay I could’ve said I’m outa here and I-Man would’ve said, Up to you, Bone. It’s important for me to remember that even though I-Man usually knew what I was going to do before I did a thing he never tried to make me do it.

So anyhow just when I’m in the middle of deciding to reenter my old life of crime you might say I spot another white couple on the other side of the marketplace. They’re easy to pick out of course due to practically everyone else is black or at least brown and the couple is getting out of this big mud-spattered Range Rover and walking over to I-Man who greets them like he knows them from before. I could tell instantly they weren’t tourists. They were both older, like in their forties and tanned like they’d been living in Jamaica a long time and incredibly cool-looking, definitely cooler than any white people I’d seen here so far.

The guy was real tall and skinny and clean-shaven but with a long ponytail and wearing a tan safari jacket and one of those great-white-hunter helmets like you see on lion tamers and reflector sunglasses. The woman had a Rasta tam on her head with brown matted dreadlocks sticking out and was wearing all these Rasta bracelets and necklaces and even though she was on the heavyset side and older she was surprisingly sexy even to me because of her red and green striped belly dancer pants with only a yellow bikini bra on top, plus she had great tits.

I’m watching from across the market and I-Man passes the tall dude a brick of sens and the guy hands him some money and everybody does a power handshake even I-Man and the woman and touches fists a couple of times and then when the couple turns to go back to the Range Rover the man pulls off his shades and helmet and wipes off his face with his sleeve and suddenly my mouth goes dry and my eyes practically bug out of my head.

I know him. I know his face, way down deep inside me, like in my chest I know him. And for the first time I understood why I’d decided to follow I-Man to Jamaica. I knew he’d be here. It’s my father! My real father! My mouth flopped open and I couldn’t say anything but in my mind I’m like calling him in this little boy’s voice, Daddy! Daddy! Over here, it’s me, your son Chappie!

I didn’t once think it might be a case of mistaken identity, I knew absolutely it was him. I’d recognized his face the second I saw it from how I remembered it when I was a little kid and from the picture my grandmother had and he still looked a little like a tall thin JFK even with the ponytail. I remembered him from when I was with him all the time and he was still married to my mom and life was perfect. It was definitely my real father!

I started running then, dodging around people and jumping over goats and chickens in cages and shoving my way up and down the long jammed aisles until I finally got to the other side of the huge tin-roofed market building where I blew by I-Man just as my father and the white Rasta woman slammed the doors of the Range Rover only about a hundred feet beyond and drove out of the lot between a bunch of buses onto a narrow street. My father was driving and they weren’t moving very fast due to the mud and deep ruts so I ran after them, right down the middle of the street with people jumping out of my way and dogs barking as I blasted past running faster than I’ve ever run before, stretching my legs out in front of me as far as they’d reach and pumping my arms and hollering, Wait up! Wait up! It’s me, it’s your son Chappie!

I chased them down one street and then up another and was only a few yards behind them and even got close enough almost to jump onto the back bumper where I could’ve hung on to the spare tire and ridden there, when they turned onto a bigger street and the Rover speeded up some but I kept on running after and hollering even though my chest was burning and my legs felt like iron… I slipped once and fell down and scraped myself and got mud all over me but I scrambled back up and saw them still ahead of me but further away now and I ran after them anyhow but limping and both knees and the palm of one hand bleeding from when I fell. They got to the center of the town where there’s this big traffic circle but when I came to it the Rover was already on the far side with a big fountain in between us and it turned off there onto like a highway that led out of town and I heard my father shift into fourth gear and hit the gas and the Rover disappeared around the bend probably doing fifty already.

For a long time I stood there with my heart pounding and my chest on fire and the only thought in my head was that at last I’d seen my father. My real father! Finally after all these years I’d come to Jamaica not knowing that I was looking for him even and then one day completely by accident I’d found him. And even though I’d lost him again I knew it was only temporary this time. I was bleeding and muddy and all but I felt like I’d finally woken up from one of those nightmares that trick you into thinking you’re awake and this is really happening. It was like this incredible relief.