Blue Skin of the Sea (11 page)

“You’re the boss, Red, you’re the boss,” Uncle Raz said. Then he turned to me and snapped, “Stow that gear, Sonny, and get Mister Red a beer.”

It wasn’t even seven in the morning.

We set out through the harbor about the time the rest of the charter boats were still idling at their moorings, skippers roaming their boats, sponging salt off the windows, bringing out the rods and fingering their secret lures. Red stood on the stern deck with his knees up against the transom.

I pulled my favorite big-game lure out and checked the leader and skirt for nicks—a straight runner with a center leader hole. We’d caught three marlin on it already.

“Don’t use that one, boy,” Red said. “It’s no good. You got to pick just the right plug for these waters.”

“Sonny,” Uncle Raz called. “Let Red do that. You just bring the rods out.”

Scowling, I followed Uncle Raz’s orders. Right or wrong, I did what he said. I needed the job.

Honey settled down on the stern bunk. She gave me a funny look, as if she were amused.

I half-smiled back and turned away.

Uncle Raz headed south, slowly, so Red could get a look at the coves and small beaches along the shoreline.

Uncle Raz shook his head when I came into the cabin after setting the rods in their holders. “This place is dead, dead, dead!” he said.

We passed by the point at the far end of the bay where the new Hilton Hotel was going to be built. It looked like any other part of the coast, mostly kiawe and coconut trees, and scrub brush above a black lava-rock shore. The cove below was green and clear.

“Your aunty doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Uncle Raz said suddenly. The night before, we were all up at Keo’s house talking about the news of the Hilton. “We have enough hotels already,” Aunty Pearl had said. But Uncle Raz thought it was the best thing he’d heard in years.

“Look at that jungle of thorn trees,” he said as we cruised by the point. “The hotel will turn that into something beautiful.”

It wasn’t at all clear to me why Aunty Pearl had gotten so upset about a new hotel going in. “Someday we going lose more than we get,” were her exact words. “This is only the beginning.”

Uncle Raz practically shouted at her. “Yes, it’s only the beginning—of a much livelier place.” He’d paced back and forth on the porch waving around a bottle of beer. “This coast will
be jumping
with tourists,” he went on. “No place in the world is as good as the Big Island for marlin fishing. No place. When people find that out, we’ll
all
be rolling in business.”

Aunty Pearl listened, never changing the expression on her face. “They only want the money,” she said when Uncle Raz was done. She’d said it softly, almost in a whisper.

Uncle Raz threw up his hands and walked away.

By now the sun was peeking over Hualalai and the trees on the point were backlit, glowing like motionless torches in the first heat of day. Uncle Raz edged close to the cove. Red walked in from the deck, beer in one hand and one of Uncle Raz’s lures in the other, a flashy one that someone had given him. Uncle Raz said you couldn’t catch a log with it.

Uncle Raz perked up and spoke a little louder so Red could hear him over the hum of the engines. “They’re going to blast through that rock over there so they can get down into the cove and make a little beach.”

Red dipped his head and scanned the point. In my mind I saw white-skinned tourists jumping off the rocks into the water, and striped towels spread along a man-made beach. The cove was full of swimmers and the ocean was murky from all the commotion. No more spear fishing in
that
spot.

Red turned away, and held up the lure. “Try this one,” he said.

Uncle Raz smiled. “That’s the one, Red.”

It was a long boat ride to two o’clock, zigzagging our way out to the fishing grounds, then back toward the island, then back out to the grounds again.

Honey drank Cokes and lay around in the sun with her dark glasses and suntan oil. I caught her watching me a couple of times, still amused. As hard as I tried to keep from glancing at her, I couldn’t. What was so funny?

Red was all over the place—out on the bow, up on the flying bridge, down in the bilge. “Come see these engines, Honey,” he called once, but Honey just cocked her head and lifted her Coke.

Red told us he owned four bars now, clubs, he called them. “Honey used to dance at one of them,” he said, “until she married me. Now she owns the damn place.”

Uncle Raz smiled and shook his head. “Kailua is just a spit on the sidewalk compared to the mainland,” he said. Uncle Raz was the only one in our family who’d ever even been there.

“You’re right about that,” Red agreed. “But Kona is good for marlin, at least most of the time. Fighting a fat swordfish is as good as bull riding. There’s nothing like it.”

“That’s what I keep telling Sonny’s daddy,” Uncle Raz said, jerking his head toward me. “I don’t know how he can sit around all day in a pack of small boats hoping to find a couple of tuna.
Marlin!
That’s where
life
is at!”

At precisely two o’clock, Red snapped his fingers and pointed at Uncle Raz, who turned to me. “Sonny, bring in the lines.” The reels hadn’t clicked once in six hours.

Uncle Raz swung back toward the island.

We anchored off a long stretch of uninhabited shoreline in a small, turquoise shallow-water cove.

Red dug into the pile of new diving gear, tossing things out to me and Uncle Raz—fins, face masks, snorkels, and two high-powered spearguns. The three of us went aft and studied the shapes on the ocean floor below. The stern rose gently as mild swells rolled in to shore, the water clear to a depth of thirty or forty feet, a perfect day for diving.

“Come on in, Honey,” Red said, sitting on the stern bunk near Honey’s feet. Uncle Raz and I looked back at ourselves in the lenses of her silver-mirrored glasses. Red stroked one of her feet with his beefy fingers. “Come on,” he said. “I bought you a nice pair of fins.”

Honey gave him a sweet smile. “You boys go on,” she said.

Red moved in and gave her a kiss. He was quiet for a moment when he pulled away, as if distracted by a thought. Honey put her hand on his, and he smiled back.

Red stood up quickly and put on his new fins and face mask, then picked up one of the spears and jumped over the transom into the ocean.

“Be careful,” Honey called, but I didn’t think Red heard her.

Uncle Raz and I jumped in after him and put our gear on in the water.

The sea was warm, and I floated easily on its surface, staring down into the reef and listening to the hollow sound of my breathing echoing through the snorkel. It’s funny how the whole world shifts when you take that first breath-stopping gaze under water. Any way you look at it, it’s a completely new world, a place that shrinks you down, a huge aquarium with hundreds of different sea creatures, none of which seems to think you’re anything special.

I took in a deep breath and followed Red and Uncle Raz to the bottom, popping my ears against the pressure as I dove deeper. The sandy areas were smooth, with no shell trailings. But there was a small school of fat
ulua
that we chased around a cave on the underside of a coral shelf. Uncle Raz speared two of them and took them back to the boat.

I floated like a log in deep sea, face down, breathing through my snorkel, daydreaming. The sun felt good on my back.

Suddenly Red frogged clumsily below and looked up, waving his hand for me to follow him. Then he came up for air. “Come,” he gasped. “Come see … You won’t believe this.”

He led me over the top of a giant undersea formation forty feet down, a massive shelf of milky coral, looking like an ancient aquarian island-city for hundreds of fish—blue, green, yellow, even black. I’d never seen anything like it before, fish nibbling and darting around in waves, lolling in and out of a thousand deep cracks and sharp-cornered fissures.

I floated over it, still as a leaf, as if caught in a vivid dream that I didn’t want to wake from. A deep circular shaft fell about
fifteen feet farther into the center of the island, to a white sand bottom. And from mossy balconies in the wall of the descending hollow, a horde of sea life speckled over the coral, nibbling and pecking, feeding, paying no mind at all to the two of us lurking over them.

I looked up to find a landmark on shore, trying to fix our location as well as I could.

Red took a deep breath and dove down for a closer look at the hole in the coral island. He stayed there about a minute and a half, then came up and sucked in great gulps of air.

“You see … that black coral down there? … That’s my prize … that’s my mar lin!”

I went down for a look of my own. At the bottom of the circular shaft grew a magnificent, complete, reaching head of black coral, framed within the well as if the whole place existed only to draw attention to this black jewel at its base.

Flawless.

When I came back up, Red seemed to be thinking about what to do next.

“Where’s Raz,” he demanded. I pointed to Uncle Raz’s snorkel sticking out of the water closer to shore. “Get him,” Red said.

I swam over to Uncle Raz and told him what Red had found. “It’s beautiful … the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen underwater.” Then I added, “Red wants you—now.”

Uncle Raz beat me over to Red by at least ten lengths. “Come on, come on!” Red said, waving Uncle Raz closer. “I want that coral, for Honey—she can put it behind the bar in one of the clubs.”

“Let’s take a look,” Uncle Raz said, then went under, little puffs of air flowing from his snorkel as he glided down. I followed him.

Hand over hand Uncle Raz pulled his way down into the
well. Fish darted away as he approached, then turned, and watched from a distance. I moved, so I could see better, then dove deeper, tempted by the beauty of the fish, and the black coral. Red watched above, floating in watery space.

The pressure was strong and my ears ached. How Uncle Raz could go so deep was a mystery to me. He was the best diver of all of us.

Uncle Raz stopped when he got about three-quarters of the way down the hollow. I moved around to get a better look, diving farther into the well, and saw what had stopped him.

Inches away from his left arm a massive brown head protruding from a cave waved slowly back and forth, eyes pinned on Uncle Raz—a fat moray eel, undulating with its breathing, repulsive, cavernous mouth chewing the water.

Uncle Raz started to back out of the well. The eel’s mouth opened and closed. You could see the line of needle-sharp teeth.

Then the head fired forward like a spear and bit Uncle Raz’s arm savagely, between his wrist and elbow.

Uncle Raz reeled back in pain. He yelled, and bubbles rushed from his mouth. He must have wanted to yank his arm away, but he knew it would be useless. The eel would only bite deeper. Uncle Raz kept still, his mouth in a tight grimace. He needed a razor-sharp knife to hack himself free, to get up for air. But he didn’t have one, only the spear gun, and he was too close to use it.

Most of the eel’s long snakelike body was twisted into a coral cave, gripping the turns and twists with steel muscles.

He’s going to die! Uncle Raz is going to die!
I recoiled. Is this really happening?
Don’t ever do that again, boy! You’re not a baby anymore
…
Calm down, now.
The dream-memory. I kicked frantically around him, above him. I could do
nothing.

But Uncle Raz was not one to panic. With an inner will I would never find within myself, he remained unbelievably
calm. An eel needed to breathe. And like a fish, it would open its mouth to do that. It would bite again, but there would be an instant where the mouth would open.

When? Could Uncle Raz hold his breath that long?

I had to go up for air.

“What’s going on?” Red asked when I burst into the open.

I gulped in acres of air and dove back down without answering. Uncle Raz’s lungs must have been exploding.

Then the eel breathed and Uncle Raz broke free. He pushed to the surface, blood streaming a wet mist from his arm. I rose beside him.

“Aahhhh
… ”he gasped as we hit the air.
“Damn,
that hurts!”

“What?” Red said, clearly irritated.

“Puhi”
Uncle Raz said, his face pinched up in pain. “Damn eel bit me.”

I was so scared I could hardly speak. Blood was turning the water brown around him. “You’re bleeding badly,” I finally said.

Uncle Raz gave me the speargun and held his wounded arm with his good hand. “S’okay … let it bleed … the teeth on those damn things are always contaminated with something … ”

“Let’s get to the boat and clean up your arm,” Red said. “Then go back for that coral.”

Silence.

“You can shoot it, or something,” Red said.

Uncle Raz stared at Red. “Sonny,” he finally said. “Come with me.”

Uncle Raz and I swam back to the boat and climbed aboard. “Get the fish knife,” he snapped, ripping his face mask off.

Honey sat up and lifted her glasses.

Uncle Raz reached into the fish box for one of the speared
ulua.
I gave him the knife and he sliced several meaty slabs of its flesh into long strips and tied them together in the center with a length of fishing line.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Mister Red wants the coral. We’re going to get it for him.”

“What!
But … ”

“He pays me well, boy. I do what he says, and you do what I say. You better pay attention if you want to run a charter boat, because this is how it’s done. Go pull the anchor.”

Uncle Raz fired up the engines and walked the boat over toward Red, the dual exhausts bubbling and gurgling with each roll of the hull. I waited on the bow for the signal to drop the anchor. Uncle Raz scowled through the windshield. His arm was full of holes and had to hurt like crazy.
He
was crazy to go back down there. He could have drowned!

When he nodded, I dropped the anchor, tested it, then went aft. Uncle Raz shut the boat down.

Honey watched in silence as Uncle Raz came out into the sun wrapping an old Ace bandage around his arm.