“Danny!” Trey called to a similarly clad young man lying on the beach in front of him. Danny had dozed off, his long, pencil-thin dreadlocks trailing in the golden sand. The hair was almost as light as the sand itself, in contrast to the owner of the hair who was midnight black. Danny jerked up, only to subside nearly immediately. “Danny,” Trey said on an intake, “you want some of this, man?” He extended the joint and held in the smoke to better absorb the THC into his lungs. Danny stretched out his hand and took the cigarette without opening his eyes. He put it to his lips and drew deep. It was his turn to hold in the smoke. As they sucked in the heady marijuana, passing the joint back and forth, the sea roared in the background. “Good stuff,” Trey murmured, his eyes reddening and narrowing as the weed took effect.
“Yeah, I get it from a partner in the village. Not the usual suspect,” Danny replied. He sat up and looped his waist-length dreadlocks with one hand, tucking them into a knot. He looked over at his cousin, his eyes as red as Trey’s. “This man have it sick, horse. Only quality weed he supplying. No compress, only fresh.” He took another hit. “I trying to get him to sell me some more but he brakesing. Say the man who he getting it from gone away for a week.”
The waves continued to roll up on the sand. Trey’s orange surfboard, leaning on the fisherman’s shed next to him, cast a long shadow across his deeply tanned face. His olive skin was freckled across the bridge of his nose, complemented by his short, nappy Afro, the color of brown sugar. Full lips curved into a slight smile as he contemplated the surf. His hand reached out to lightly caress the board, which was rough with a thick coat of wax. “You going and hit that again before it reach cigarette?” he asked Danny, who shook his head and passed it back to him. Trey nursed the joint until the weed was burned off and passed the rest of the funk back to Danny. “I ent feeling for no cigarette right now.” They were quiet for a few minutes. “Thinking of going back.” Danny said nothing. “Two months in the jungle is enough, man.” Danny smoked without comment. The murmur of the waves continued. “I go have to call them men to pick back up a little end in work.”
“Is so you is a work jumbie, boy?” Danny finally replied. “Two months of surf, weed, and country food, and you ready to go back in the rat race?” He shook his head again. “Me, I wouldn’t rush back to go and work in no factory assembly line.”
“Is not no assembly line,” Trey snapped. “I tell you, I is a technician. Is skilled work, man. And the two months was good, partner, but is time I go back. I have things to do.”
“Like what? Tack back by that slut?” Danny rolled onto his knees and to his feet.
“Don’t talk about she so.”
“But she’s a slut, Trey. She leave you for your partner. How she go play you like that?”
Trey’s golden eyes, about the color of his skin, gave him a ghostly appearance. Right now they were cloudy with weed and budding rage. “She make a mistake, all right? That don’t make she a slut.”
Danny sucked his teeth in disgust and grabbed his own board from the sand. “I heading up the road. Later.” He flicked the butt of the cigarette into the blue ocean. “Tasha real chain you up, boy,” he muttered as he walked up the track leading to the main road. “If I was you, I would have shoot both of them.”
Trey scowled and lit another cigarette from a pack in his pocket. “Is not Tash, is Garvin. That man is the one who is to blame,” he told his cousin’s broad back. Danny wasn’t listening, focused instead on scaling the rocky path without dropping or dinging his board on the huge stones on either side of the track. “Is Garvin who pull she in!” Trey swiftly sucked on the cigarette. “Is he, not she. Is he fault.”
Danny’s blond locks disappeared over the top of the steep path. Trey was left alone with the rocks and the waves, the sand and the fisherman’s hut.
Beyond the road, the Sans Souci forest towered, dim and green and forbidding. In two months, Trey had only been in the forest twice, both times with his cousin. They had gone to find a certain spring which Danny swore had the sweetest water in the world, but they had become lost in the undergrowth and never found it. They made do with the chlorinated water piped in by the public utility, but Trey craved the fresh, untreated water of the spring. He stubbed the cigarette out in the sand and rose, grabbing his board and heading toward the forest in bounding strides.
Bareback and barefoot, his lean, muscular body quickly maneuvered the path. His calloused feet barely registered the bumpy pitch of the Toco Road before he was in the cool mulch of the forest. It was rainy season, but the ground wasn’t sodden, only damp and spongy with fallen leaves and topsoil. He had no idea where he was going, but with a quick glance around for a landmark, Trey moved into the woods. He passed a giant immortelle tree, a clump of stunted cocoa trees, a dead one stretched across what could have been a track. The gloom deepened as he walked, the trees becoming larger and taller, the ground softer and cooler despite the mid-afternoon heat.
The light changed. It was somehow brighter, more airy. A sloped clearing appeared full of lime-green, leafy shrubs about a head taller than his six feet. “To ras!” he breathed, breaking into the space gingerly and leaving his surfboard behind.
The weed was planted in even rows, smelling pungent, sweet, musky. As far as he could see, marijuana trees were coming into bloom, their small orange flowers just starting to show — plants ripe for the picking. Making his way through the rows, Trey tenderly brushed the leaves and stems. He almost missed the hut in the center of the field, stumbling when he noticed the galvanized steel sheeting that made up its walls and roof. The double gate, also corrugated sheets of steel, bore a heavy iron padlock threaded through a thick steel chain looped into a pair of holes in the gates. The message was clear: Keep out. To Trey that was as good as an invitation.
He walked the entire field until his feet were sore and covered in mud. There wasn’t a soul in sight. He picked his way back to the galvanized shed and peered through the holes in the gate. It was dark inside and he couldn’t see much, just large hanging shapes. The smell, however, was unmistakable — it was exactly the same weed he had just been cleaning. Trey turned and ran for the road, leaving his surfboard behind as a bright orange marker to light his way back to paradise.
Jimmy the maxi-taxi driver was cagey, driving extra slowly on the winding country road. Though a large banner on the back windscreen proclaimed it Jah Bus, the real owner was a Christian who wanted no part of Rastafari. A keen businessman, he recognized that popular culture glorified all that was Rasta, from dreadlocks to Bob Marley and marijuana use, so he latched onto the trend to make his business popular. He warned his drivers, the men he hired to work the vehicle on a twenty-four-hour rotation, that he wasn’t going to allow weed smoking on the job. What they did in their own time was their affair, but behind the wheel of Jah Bus they were to be clean and sober.
It was close to 10 and Jimmy, an occasional Rasta, had finished his last trip with only $100 in pocket after oil, gas, and the $300 child maintenance he had to pay his ex-girlfriend every two weeks for their three sons. When Trey and Danny flagged him down and put their unusual proposition to him, Jimmy had been of two minds, thinking about the maxi’s owner and the prospect of being out of a job. But the offer of a bonus payment was irresistible. It wasn’t every day that someone offered to rent your maxi for five pounds of weed. Though he doubted the resurrection of Haile Selassie I, the late Ethiopian emperor whom Rastas acknowledge as the descendant of Christ, he certainly agreed that smoking weed was an ideal part of livity. Five pounds of it — a whole black bin liner full of the stuff — would keep him high for quite some time.