Blue Skin of the Sea (15 page)

I drove Keo home to Aunty Pearl, and watched as his mother took him in and gave him a long, surrounding hug. The blanket still covered him, half of it hanging down the porch steps. Then Aunty Pearl smiled and pulled me into her arms next to Keo.

Someday Dad would tell me. I would make him tell me. To him, and to Aunty Pearl, my mother was Crissy with her hand on Dad’s chest, not just an old photograph in a picture album. Once she was as alive as my jumping heart.

Who was she? I would
make
him tell me.

Dad’s sampan rolled gently in the low swells as it idled alongside the pier at five in the morning. The black sky held only the faintest hint of sunrise, a light sketch of midnight-blue behind the mountain. Keo and I sat on the stern transom watching Dad and Uncle Harley stow their gear.

Dad glanced over at me. “You can still change your mind and come along, Sonny.”

“No, that’s okay. I’ll stay and keep Keo company.”

Dad nodded and went forward to the hold.

Keo scowled at the deck, his arms crossed. Missing a chance to go on an overnight fishing trip to South Point was about as low as it got for Keo. And all because a
girl
was coming to visit.

Uncle Harley put a couple of cases of soda pop and beer into the ice chest. “Don’t look so miserable,” he said, glancing over to Keo. “Raz will be around if you need anything. You can come along next time. Of course, South Point could be hot this trip, could catch forty or fifty
ono,
never can tell.” Uncle Harley smiled, but Keo didn’t think it was so funny.

“Let’s go,” Dad said. “It’s gonna be a dynamite day. I can feel it in my bones. Eh, Keo, you didn’t hide any bananas on board did you?” Bananas were bad luck of the worst kind.

Keo smiled at that. “Maybe I did.”

“Scoot, you two rats,” Uncle Harley said. “Throw the lines.”

Keo and I pulled the stern closer to the pier and climbed up the truck tires, then untied the boat and tossed the lines down onto the deck. Dad pulled the
Ipo
away and headed out into the dark harbor, the old diesel
tokking
smoothly. Uncle Harley stood in the dim deck light looking back at us, curling the sternline into neat loops in his hand.

Within minutes the
Ipo
was nothing more than a small yellow light shrinking south.

It was quiet in the harbor, and cool. As much as Keo loved being on a boat, I loved being on the pier that early in the morning, a time when Kailua-Kona stood still, with only the anticipation of the day to come rustling around in the air.

But Aunty Pearl had plans for us. Keo and I began the long walk back up the hill to his house.

“Tutu going bring Melanie up here from the airport,” Aunty Pearl said. “I want you boys to show her Kailua. This is her first time on the Big Island.”

Keo stared out the window. We sat at the kitchen table waiting for the arrival of Melanie McNeil, Keo’s mysterious Honolulu cousin. Neither of us had ever met her before. In fact Aunty Pearl had only seen her once many years ago. But, of course, since Melanie’s mother was her cousin, Aunty Pearl knew everything there was to know about her. She sounded pretty flashy to me—her
baole
father owned a radio station; her
mother was a dancer at the Moana Hotel in Waikiki; she went to private school; and to top it off she was fifteen, a year older than Keo, and two older than me. “Her mother says she can sing like an angel at sunset,” Aunty Pearl said. “She has a very, very rare gift.”

I wondered what a rich, half-Hawaiian, fifteen-year-old girl who went to private school and could sing like an angel was like. What were we going to show her, anyway? How to fish? How to clean boats? How to shoot BB guns at the dump?

“This is going to be great,” Keo said flatly when Aunty Pearl had gone out on the porch to see if anyone was coming up the driveway. “Poor little thing. A whole
week
without her mommy and daddy. Probably never even been away from home before.”

“Keo, Sonny, they’re here,” Aunty Pearl called. Keo looked like he wanted to spit.

We went out just as Tutu Max and Grampa Joe pulled up to the house in a cloud of dust. The door on the driver’s side flew open and Tutu Max pushed herself up out of the car.

Grampa Joe got out and opened the back door, just like at a hotel. When Melanie McNeil stepped out into the sun I nearly went speechless.

She looked more like a woman than a girl, dressed up like she was going to church or to dinner at Kona Inn. She was about as tall as me and twice as beautiful as any girl I’d ever seen in my life—dark, silky skin, and eyes as clear as a freshwater pond.

“Aunty Pearl?” Melanie said, looking up to the porch.

“Oh, little baby, you are so
grown up.”
Aunty Pearl said, truly surprised.

Melanie smiled and walked up to hug her like she owned the place.

“This is your cousin, Keo, and his cousin on his father’s side, Sonny.”

Melanie looked at us in a funny way, as if we were children or the yardmen. “Hi.”

Aunty Pearl and Tutu Max gathered Melanie up and shooed her into the house. Grampa Joe came up behind them carrying all four of her suitcases.

After she said good-bye to Tutu Max and Grampa Joe, Melanie followed Aunty Pearl into her room, Keo’s room, and closed the door. Aunty Pearl stayed there with her. We could hear Melanie crying, and Aunty Pearl soothing her. Neither of us could make out what she was saying.

We had to wait on the porch. “Don’t you go anywhere,” Aunty Pearl said to Keo. “She’s just tired from her trip”

“Big trip,” he said when Aunty Pearl went back inside. “One hour on an airplane.”

“I’d cry if I had to stay in your room for a week, too,” I said.

Keo flicked his fist over and punched me.

“Okay, okay! But you gotta admit, she’s darn good-looking, and way too fancy for anything
we
got going,” I told him, rubbing my arm.

Keo stared out into the dusty yard. It was so quiet you could hear the flies buzz.

“I don’t know if I can last a week of baby-sitting
her”
Keo said. “That’ll be about as much fun as scraping barnacles off a boat.”

A soft, female voice came from the doorway behind us, like a sudden breeze. “Oh?”

Keo leaped to his feet and turned to face Melanie. “I … I mean … ”

“That’s okay, kid,” she said. Keo frowned.

She’d changed into a long blue muumuu that looked like it had just come from the store. Her face was flawless—green eyes under sharp eyebrows, and thick brown hair that fanned out over her shoulders. But all Keo saw was the look in her eye.

It said, “Don’t get in my way, buster, if you want to live to see tomorrow.”

Keo whirled around and stomped over toward the pigpen. I got up and said, “Excuse us,” and followed him.

As I walked away I heard her whisper,
“Morons.”

“Now listen, boys,” Aunty Pearl said the next morning. “Take Melanie down to see Kona Inn and let her walk through the shops in Kailua. Here’s some money to buy lunch for the three of you.”

She held a five-dollar bill out, but Keo hesitated.

Melanie grabbed it and stuffed it into a large canvas shoulder bag. “I’ll keep that, Aunty Pearl. He’ll probably just lose it.”

Melanie wore a bright new yellow dress and white leather sandals, and sunglasses. I felt almost naked standing there barefoot in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.

Keo was steaming. Aunty Pearl pushed him toward the door. He shrugged her hands away and took off down the long, rock and dirt driveway to Hualalai Road without turning to see if Melanie was following.

“Uh … you ever been to Kona before?” I asked.

Melanie narrowed her eyes and glared at me, then followed Keo down the driveway without answering, the large bag bouncing off her hip.

I looked up at Aunty Pearl. She shook her head and said in a sighing tone of voice, “I don’t know, Sonny, I really don’t know.”

The three of us marched silently down toward Kailua in single file until Keo stopped a little ways up from town. “I got something to show you,” he said looking at Melanie, “that is, if you don’t mind getting your feet a little dusty.”

She let the bag drop from her shoulder and looked Keo in the eye. “Kid, there’s no place on this planet that you could dream of going that I couldn’t go as well.”

Keo’s eyes pinched down when she said
kid.

“Follow me,
Queenie,”
he said.

They stared at each other with machete looks.

Keo bolted off into the dry grass and scrub-tree jungle alongside the road, bending low to squeeze through the middle strands of a barbed-wire fence that separated the road from a tangled cow pasture. The grass was mashed down between the trees so I knew there were cows around, and maybe bulls.

Melanie pulled her dress up high, halfway up her thighs, and bent through the fencing. I followed, watching out for thorns and bulls.

She kept pace with Keo, stride for stride, both of them moving through the trees much faster than necessary. We climbed over old stone walls covered with brush and vines, walls built hundreds of years earlier by the old Hawaiians, and picked our way over outcroppings of sculptured black lava rock frozen in shapes of oozing mud.

Keo stopped when we came to a low depression in the ground, like a dry pond the size of a small, empty swimming pool. A pile of flat stones lay in a small heap in the bottom. Keo called me down into the sink and I helped him lift them away, revealing the entrance to the old lava tube that Uncle Harley had shown us years before. It was one of only two or three places where the underground tunnel came to the surface. Uncle Harley had told us that you could go from near the top of the mountain clear down to the ocean inside the tube, and pop
out under water somewhere off Kailua Bay. But I’d never heard of anyone who’d done it.

“Lava tube,” Keo said, smirking. “Too bad you can’t go in and take a look around.”

“Think again, kid. Turn around and don’t look until I tell you.”

Keo glanced at me.

Tempting as it was, neither of us turned around until she gave us the word. When we did, she was standing there in a blue T-shirt and jeans, barefoot. An inch of yellow dress poked out of the top of her bag. “So what’s holding you up?”

“Well … ” Keo stumbled a minute. “We can’t go in very far without a light. Watch out for spider webs and centipedes.”

Melanie set her bag down and gave Keo and me a look that said, “So move it.”

Keo lowered himself into the hole in the ground, and I
knew
it must have bothered him to do so without first sticking his head down into the opening and flashing a light around to see what was there.

Melanie brushed by me to follow Keo into the hole. The faint smell of soap lingered for a second or two after she passed. Her hair shone in the sunlight. She grabbed it and curled it around as she dropped into the pit.

I followed, as close as I dared. The tube went downhill for only a few feet before the light from the opening nearly disappeared.

“Can’t go any farther without a light,” Keo said. “Besides, there are so many offshoots you could get lost in here and never get out. One boy went into a lava tube down near Kau, and never came out again.” The thought of dying alone in utter blackness made me cringe.

“There are bones in here, too,” I added. “I think this was used as a burial cave.”

Melanie wasn’t impressed. “Let’s go deeper. Just till there’s no light at all. I want to see pure blackness.”

“Not smart,” Keo said, passing Melanie and me, and crawling back to the mouth of the tube. “Too easy to get lost.”

“What? You
afraid?”

“No, just smart.”

I agreed with Keo, though I liked Melanie’s idea. When we’d been in before we had flashlights and hadn’t thought to turn them off. It would be something to see.