Blue Skin of the Sea (13 page)

I carried the twenty dollar bill around for more than a week. I could feel it in my front pocket, folded once and lying flat against my thigh.

Finally I bought a new spinner and a fishing tackle box with three trays, the kind I’d wanted for years. I even had enough left over for a couple of new lures.

I should have been bragging to Keo about my riches.
He’d
never gotten a twenty dollar tip. And as far as I knew, he’d never been kissed by someone as beautiful as Honey.

But I kept it all to myself.

Whenever I stood at the edge of the island, where rock and water boomed in a blaze of white brightness, I always chose to face the sea. “Never underestimate its power,” Dad had told me. “It could wake, yawn, and swallow you between one heartbeat and the next.”

On Saturday, May 21, 1960, I spent the night up at Keo’s house. Uncle Harley was visiting Tutu and Grampa Mendoza in Honolulu, and Dad and Uncle Raz had driven over to the other side of the island, to the Suisan fish market in Hilo.

Aunty Pearl sat at the kitchen table listening to the one Honolulu radio station we could get in Kona and looking at some photos in an old album.

The day’s heavy overcast had broken up, and in the gaps between clouds, the first stars, like tiny silver fish scales, sparkled against a purple twilight sky.

“Boys, come see these pictures,” Aunty Pearl called after we’d finished feeding the dogs. We came in and sat across from her at the
table, which was more like a booth at a restaurant. The chairs moved around but the table was nailed to the floor and to the wall just under the window.

“Look at this,” she said, shaking her head. “Here’s your daddy, Keo, when he was just a little older than you. What a
lolo
that boy was.” She turned the album around and there was Uncle Harley waving at the camera with a stick fish in his mouth. It shot out from both sides of his face, about half a foot on each side.

Keo laughed at the picture. “Was he really that crazy?”

“Crazy? That was
normal
for him. He was always showing off fofme.” She turned the album back around to face her, then smiled, and tapped the picture with her finger. “I never loved anyone but that silly boy there with the fish in his mouth.” It was impossible to imagine Uncle Harley without Aunty Pearl.

“Show Sonny the one where he’s swimming with the cow,” Keo said.

“Gotta go way back for that one.” Aunty Pearl flipped the pages to the beginning. “Here it is. There’s Daddy by the cow, and there,” she said to me, pointing to a boy standing on the sand watching the cowboys swim the cows out to the cattle boat, “is
your
daddy. “

Dad and Uncle Harley, like me and Keo.

“And look, there’s your Uncle Raz.” He was almost out of the photo, down the beach with a stick in his hand. “Your tutu said Raz was always chasing crabs, even when the cowboys came.” She clicked her tongue and shook her head. “He never could stand still.”

I flipped through the pages and stopped when I found a picture of Dad with his arm around my mother. They must have been about eighteen or nineteen. They were standing on the pier, a sampan behind them, and the palace in the trees beyond. Dad was thinner then, and not as muscular. My
mother was about the same height as him, but with much lighter hair, blond mixed with light brown. She was leaning into Dad, her head tilted into his neck and one hand on his chest.

“Crissy was a sweet, sweet girl, Sonny,” Aunty Pearl said. “Your daddy still misses her. It’s hard even now for him to talk about her.”

I felt bad for Dad, but as much as I wanted to I couldn’t feel his sadness. My mother was just a name and a few photographs that held no life. She was a part of Aunty Pearl’s time, and of Dad’s.

Yet the picture of her hand on Dad’s chest stayed with me long into the night.

When I awoke the next morning something wasn’t right. Keo was asleep on the other side of the room, but other than his light breathing, there were no sounds—no dogs, no birds, no chickens clucking, no nothing—and the small window was full of gray clouds. Keo’s electric clock was frozen at 1:05.

When I tapped his shoulder, he woke instantly, and sat
up.

“Something’s wrong,” I said. His eyes were both wild and blank-looking at the same time. Uncle Harley had trained him well. No one in our family ever took more than a few seconds to get out of bed once awakened.

“The clock stopped in the middle of the night, and the sky’s dark. Maybe a big storm.”

Keo tried the lamp, but it didn’t work. He slid out of bed, and I followed him into the dark kitchen. None of the switches worked there either. But strangest of all was the absence of Aunty Pearl. She always got up before us.

After prowling around we found her sitting outside on the porch, listening to a small transistor radio. The voice coming through was weak and covered with static. When she saw us she put her finger to her lips. We sat down on either side of her.

The reception may have been bad but there was no mistaking the news: a series of powerful tidal waves had hit the islands, but the worst had devastated the coastal areas of Hilo.

Dad!
There, at the fish market in Waiakea Town—as close to the ocean as you can get.

The reporter sounded excited and a little shook up. “The force of the
big
wave was tremendous,” he said. “At least twenty-six bodies have been found.” Then, in a way that sent shivers through my scalp, he said, “You would cry to see Waiakea Town … not one wall is left.”

I jumped to my feet and walked away, and then back, then away again. Aunty Pearl and Keo sat side by side, as if they were thinking of what to say.

Aunty Pearl finally spoke. “Keo, take the Jeep. Go get Grampa.”

Keo was only thirteen. Aunty Pearl had never let him drive the Jeep when Uncle Harley wasn’t there, even though she knew he could handle it. But we couldn’t call Grampa Joe because the phone was out.

“Go through the pastures and stay off the main road,” she said.

It took a few minutes to get the Jeep going. But Uncle Harley always parked it on a hill so he could kick-start it when the battery ran down. I pushed, and Keo got it going. We turned uphill and inched and jerked our way through the tangled jungle of Christmas berry and towering mango trees, never shifting out of first gear. The road was rocky and overgrown.

“Did you feel an earthquake last night?” Keo asked over the whine of the engine.

“No. There wasn’t one.”

“Yeah,” Keo said. “It would have got me up, too. There must have been a big one, though. Somewhere.”

We lurched from side to side in squeaking seats as the Jeep
climbed higher, from pasture to pasture. Keo sat forward with both hands on the wheel, chin high, trying to see the trail.

Tutu Max filled the doorway when we drove into the yard, as if she’d known we’d be coming. She held the screen door open and didn’t say a word about Keo driving. “Grampa’s listening to the radio.”

He was sitting at the kitchen table.

“Mama wants you,” Keo said.

Grampa Joe nodded and went to the back porch for his rubber boots. Everything was still wet from the night.

Tutu Max gave us each a piece of coffee cake and a hug. “Your daddy will be okay,” she said, her warm hand on the back of my neck. “They had warnings four hours before the first wave.”

Grampa Joe followed us out. Keo hesitated when we got to the Jeep.

“What you waiting for?” Grampa Joe said, waving his hand toward the driver’s seat.

For the first time that morning Keo smiled. Grampa Joe kept his irritated, worn-out look and climbed into the shotgun seat. I jumped in behind him and we bounced back down to Keo’s house, the engine growling and spitting, and the steering wheel jerking back and forth in Keo’s hands as he drove over the rocks.

When we got back to the house, Grampa Joe asked Aunty Pearl if she knew where Dad and Uncle Raz stayed when they went to Hilo. But she didn’t. “We better go find ‘urn,” Grampa Joe said. “Could be days before they get the phones back.”

“You boys go get your thongs and a blanket,” Aunty Pearl said. “I make some sandwiches.”

Grampa Joe drove us down to the harbor to see what we could find out before heading over to the other side of the island.

The electricity was out everywhere. On our side of the island the waves had been more like a high tide than tidal waves. In the
harbor most of the damage was done on the grounds of the hotels close to the ocean—the King Kam, the Kona Inn, and Waiaka Lodge.

The fishing boats were all at their moorings in the bay, their skippers standing around on the pier talking. Nearby, a hotel crew was picking through a mess of tables and chairs and mopping water out of King Kam Hotels main lobby.

The radio said that the waves—called
tsunamis
—had been set off by an earthquake in Chile. There were four or
nve
waves, one of them so big that it ran through lower Hilo like a gigantic bulldozer. A lot of people were killed because they didn’t believe a wave was coming.

“Let’s go,” Grampa Joe said, firing up the Jeep

We drove up Palani Road heading over the top of the island, wind batting at our ears. The sandwiches Aunty Pearl had made for us lay on the seat next to me, but the thought of eating made me feel sick. I wrapped a blanket around me when we rose into the cool, damp air of the uninhabited highlands.

Heavy clouds pushed in on Hilo as we dropped down toward the bay from the mountain. With the traffic signals out cars nudged carefully ahead, strangely silent, no honking. The police and National Guard had the lower section of town completely blocked off. We inched our way closer, glancing at the sullen faces in the cars around us.

Then we saw Mamo Street—now an oozing, muddy pile of rubble. The streets just above it were thick with cars and people caught up in the confusion. We could have
walked
faster than we drove.

Even with the blanket I sat huddled forward in the Jeep hugging myself. But the cold didn’t seem to bother Grampa Joe. He was a lot like Dad that way, quiet and kept to himself. Keo didn’t seem to care either, his eyes squinting ahead as if
trying to find Dad and Uncle Raz somewhere in the mass of stunned people.

Finally Grampa Joe pulled into a field of wet, knee-high grass, and parked under a clump of hao trees. My body tingled when he turned off the engine and the vibrating Jeep sat still. Every sound was muffled as my ears adjusted to the silence.

“We walk from here,” Grampa Joe said. Keo and I jumped out. After a couple of hours on the road it felt good to move around.

It was a little past noon, only six or seven hours since the wave had hit. The wave. Every time I thought of it a rush of dread pushed through my stomach. The vision of finding Dad and Uncle Raz dead lurked in my mind. But surely they would have heard the warnings. They would have headed for higher ground.

We were about a half mile from the ocean, inland from the fish market. Grampa Joe led the way. Except for the far-off wail of an occasional police siren, everything was still. Deserted.

When the smell of dead fish and swamp muck hit me I knew we were getting close. At first a thin slick of mud covered the road, then ankle-deep mud and boards with nails in them, and cane trash from the sugar mill miles down the coast.

And clothing.

“I didn’t
think
it would be easy,” Grampa Joe muttered when he saw the barricade. We’d just rounded a bend in the road. Two guards in army rain gear watched as we approached, then loomed over us with somber faces set back into the hoods of their olive-green ponchos.

“Can’t go beyond this point without a pass,” one guard said.

“Listen,” Grampa Joe said calmly, “we’re looking for two men who were in Waiakea last night. We don’t know if they’re dead or alive.”

“If they were anywhere near this place last night they probably
had about a fifty-fifty chance,” the guard said, sounding as if he’d been there for days. “There was a warning. Go check the intermediate school. They set up an emergency shelter there.”

“Where can we get a pass?” Grampa Joe asked.