Blue Skin of the Sea (16 page)

“How about you?” Melanie said to me.

“Keo’s right, it’s not a good idea.” How could I
not
take Keo’s side?

“What a bunch of panties,” she said.

Neither of us said another word to her until we got down to Kona Inn, and then only because we had to. Keo strode out ahead of us, leaving me alone with her.

She didn’t show any particular interest in Kona Inn, or Kakina’s, or even Emma’s Store with its freezer full of fudge bars, but she perked up when we ended up down at the harbor.

The
Optimystic
rocked easily alongside the pier, with Uncle Raz sitting in the sun in the fighting chair stripping old line off one of his big reels. It was a hot, full, blue-sky day, and the water sparkled, diamonds glinting on green and blue.

“So,” Uncle Raz said when we pulled the stern in and stepped aboard, “you must be Camille’s girl.”

Melanie gave him a sugary-sweet smile.

“Make yourself at home,” Uncle Raz went on, meaning Melanie. Keo and I sat on the stern transom and watched him work while Melanie went into the cabin, then down into the forward hold for a look around.

“You got a nice-looking cousin there, Keo,” Uncle Raz said.

“Nice rotten cousin, you mean.”

“I don’t think she likes us very much,” I added.

Uncle Raz laughed without looking up from the reel, the line piling up in a heap at his feet. There must have been a half mile of it.

“You wouldn’t want to take her for a boat ride, would you?” Keo asked. What a brilliant idea, I thought.
Very
good.

“Don’t you boys get enough boat rides?” Uncle Raz said.

“Not us, Uncle. Her.” Keo pointed his chin toward the cabin.

Uncle Raz glanced up at Keo, then back down at the reel and started chuckling and shaking his head. “Too much for you, eh?”

Keo sat there with his arms crossed over his chest.

Melanie was gone about five minutes, then came back out into the sun smiling as if something was going on that only she knew about. She bent down and grabbed a handful of the old fishing line on the deck. “Can I have this?” she asked. Uncle Raz gave her a sure-but-what-the-heck-for look and said, “It’s yours, take ‘urn.”

After Uncle Raz had stripped all the line off the reel, Melanie took the pile up on the pier and spread it out. Then holding one end in her hand, she began looping the line around her elbow, like a man or a boy would do, not a girl.

Keo finally looked up When Melanie had the entire mass of line neatly looped around her hand and elbow, she tied it off in the middle and folded it into her bag, which was beginning to seem like it had no bottom.

“Hey,” she said to Keo and me. “Let’s go.”

Even Uncle Raz looked up at her.

“You follow
me
this time,” she said.

Keo rolled his eyes, and Uncle Raz patted his shoulder. “Go on, boys,” he said, looking as if he were having a great time. He took the dock line from the stern cleat and pulled the boat closer to the truck tires. Keo and I climbed up onto the pier. I could
tell that we were going to hear this story from Uncle Raz again and again.

When we got to the beginning of the seawall, Melanie stopped and turned to us. “This is boring, but I have an idea.” She looked at us with wide eyes, waiting for one of us to say, “Yeah? What is it?” But neither of us did.

Melanie frowned at our lack of enthusiasm. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll go back into the cave myself.”

Keo perked up. “It’s not a cave, it’s a lava tube, and it has a thousand branches inside it. And what do you want to go back
there
for anyway?”

“I want to go way in, where it’s dark.”

“That’s dumb, just dumb,” Keo said.

“Anyway, we already did that,” I added.

“Okay,” she said, “okay. You panties stay here, but that’s what
Vm
going to do.” She spun around and started walking toward the palace, right down the middle of the road. Then she turned, and walking backward, yelled, “Pantie, pantie, pan-tie!”

Keo yelled back, “Queenie, queenie, queenie!”

She stared, as if surprised. Keo glared back. Then Melanie turned and stormed away, canvas bag bouncing.

Keo picked up a rock on the side of the road and threw it out into the harbor, and to show that I wasn’t going to take it either, I threw one myself. Even so I couldn’t help sneaking a peek down toward the palace to see how far she’d gone.

“Your mom’s not going to like it if we don’t keep an eye on her,” I said.

“Let’s go down to White Sands and go swimming.”

“Okay, but I hate to think of what would happen if she really does go into the lava tube, and gets lost.”

We started to walk toward White Sands Beach, the same way Melanie had gone. The beach was a long way down the
coast and normally we would have tried to hitch a ride. But Melanie had us all tied up. And I was beginning to think she knew it.

“We can’t let her go in there alone,” I said, grabbing Keo’s arm when we reached the intersection.

“Why not? She doesn’t need us. We could be down at South Point catching
ono
by the hundreds right now if it wasn’t for her. Anyway, she called us panties.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But … ”

Keo stuck his thumb out at the first car to come by, and it stopped. He got in, and when he saw that I wasn’t coming with him, he slammed the door. “She’s not pulling
me
around by the nose,” he said, hanging out the window as the car drove away.

The sun was high, and the pavement was hot. When there were no cars around, I hurried up the middle of the road on the broken white line, which was cooler than the blacktop

When I finally caught up with Melanie, she just kept on going in silence. The road began to twist and climb up toward the mountain, and the trees and grasses pushed out over the edges of the blacktop She passed the trail into the lava tube without seeing it.

“That was the trail,” I said.

She stopped and looked at me for the first time since I’d caught ùp with her, then she peeked around me.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“Went to the beach.”

“Good.”

I glanced down the road, then back at Melanie. “He’s not as bad as he seems,” I said. “He’s just mad about not getting to go fishing with Uncle Harley. Aunty Pearl made him stay home because you were coming.”

She stared straight at me and I had to look back down the
road again. “I didn’t know that,” she said. “Want to come with me?”

I shrugged and said, “Sure.”

I followed her into the trees wondering what Keo was doing just then—and what he was going to say the next time I saw him.

What a crazy day. All morning this girl had treated us like small
petoots,
and here I was following her around in the jungle, and
liking
it.

Melanie surprised me by the way she climbed down into the hole in the ground, as if she were getting into a car, she was so fearless. I followed her, nervously groping around in the dark, hoping I wouldn’t grab a bat or something else that moved. Soon we sat facing each other in an open area around the first bend in the lava tube. It was about as far as we could go before complete blackness.

“Let’s go farther in,” she whispered.

I couldn’t see her face, only the faintest outline of her head. “Melanie, what Keo said was true.”

“Shhh,” she said, touching my arm.

I shut up and listened, thinking she’d heard something. Then a light went on.

“Where’d you get
that?”
I asked.

Melanie held a flashlight under her chin, shooting the light upward, making grim shadows over her face.

“Off the boat. And then there’s this.” She held out the neatly looped and bundled fishing line that she’d gotten from Uncle Raz. “Now we can go into pure darkness.”

She crawled back out into the light around the bend and motioned for me to follow. She tied one end of the fishing line to a large rock, working quickly. “What do you think?” she asked.

It wasn’t the best knot I’d seen, but it would do. Melanie smiled, then said, “Ready?”

“I guess so.”

The tube narrowed and twisted and turned off at sharp angles and opened into big areas, only to shrink again into nearly impassable slits. And like the branches of a tree it shot off into side alleys or completely new mile-long tunnels for all I could tell. At one point we had to get down on our stomachs and squeeze through to go any farther. On the other side was a large, round room. Water dripped from one wall and fell into a small mud hole. The air was cold, and the room smelled like a rusty Jeep in a junk pile after a rain.

“This should be far enough,” she said, so low I could barely hear her. It was one time I agreed with her completely. We sat next to each other and leaned against the dry side of the room.

Then Melanie turned the flashlight off.

Neither of us moved. I held my breath in honor, I suppose, of the complete and utter lack of light, so profound, so foreign. I couldn’t believe that my eyes were wide open and finding it absolutely impossible to focus on anything at all. Something would appear, I thought, as my eyes adjusted. But everything remained completely black. And if it weren’t for the dripping water, the silence would have been every bit as piercing as the darkness.

“Wow,” Melanie whispered. “Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.”

We sat without speaking for a long time, listening to the drip A voice kept chattering on somewhere inside my mind, rushing in to fill the empty spaces, not knowing what to do with this new state of being.

Then, as if floating down from a heavy mist that filtered through tall eucalyptus trees on the high midlands of Mauna Kea, I heard what was without question the most beautiful sound I’d ever thought possible to hear.

A voice. Clear, crisp, gentle. Perfect.

“Pupu, binubinu, pupu, binubinu e
… ”

When Aunty Pearl had told Keo and me that Melanie McNeil could sing like an angel it had passed over me in less time than I spent thinking about the dirt under my fingernails. But now that voice was inside me, moving outward, soothing my uneasiness about being in the blackness, and igniting feelings I never knew I had.

For a time my own inner voice stopped its yakking, and listened.

“…
o ke kaba kai
…”

I sat perfectly still, as if the slightest movement would cause her to stop. The sound of her voice drenched me in heat, fanning a growing fire in my chest, and sending strange tingling sensations wisping down my arms. I saw myself on a breathless sea in uncharted waters, standing at the rail of an old schooner, waiting for a sign, waiting for something to happen. Then I was underwater, gagging.
Don’t you ever do that again
… I put my hands over my ears as if to silence the awful, unex-plainable dream-memory. What
was
it? I almost said something to Melanie, but didn’t.

“…
.pupu, binubinu e
… ”

When she stopped, and all was silent again, I willed the voice to return, trying to absorb the sound, knowing this was a moment I’d never forget. The wrenching dream-memory left me shaking. I wanted to be closer to Melanie, to have her sing again, to calm me down.

Then I heard her crying, softly.

“Melanie? What’s wrong?”

I waited, listening to the dripping water while her trembling slowed.

“Daddy’s sick. He almost died. He’s in the hospital with pneumonia.” She was silent a moment, then went on. “My
mother sent me here so she could be with him.” She started crying again. “What if he dies?”

“Yeah,” I said, barely whispering.

Thau
what she was crying about in Keo’s room.

The heavy blackness of the lava tube closed in on me.
What if be died?

What if
my
Dad died? My tongue felt dry, remembering Waiakea Town.

I fumbled around on the ground with my hand until I found Melanie. I traced her position. She was sitting with her knees up and her arms folded across her chest. She reached for my hand when I touched her. The palm of her hand, where it met with mine, was damp. I felt it trembling. I could feel her wiping her eyes with her free hand. We sat in silence a long time. I wanted to tell her that my mother had died. But I didn’t.

“Let’s get out of here,” Melanie finally said.

She turned on the flashlight and every drifting thought disappeared. The presence of light alone changed everything— the song, the feelings, the fears. Gone. As if they’d never been there.

We followed the fishing line, crawling back out into the crushing light of day, then walked back through the trees without speaking. Melanie followed a few steps behind me, her bare feet as sure and as tough as mine. I thought about her parents, and about being alone.

“Hey,” I said, “I want to show you something.”

She let me lead her away from the trail. I veered south through an overgrown jungle of grass and trees, over ancient rock walls and under giant, hard, and brittle kiawe groves. My shirt dampened in the heat and stuck to my back and chest, turning the dust from the cave dark brown.

On a small rise I found what I’d wanted to show her—the
old rock foundation of the first missionary house built on the island of Hawaii, now abandoned for more than a century.

“This must have been the living room,” I said half jokingly as we stood on a flat area that seemed to have the best view of the landscape. “A young man and woman, not much older than us, lived here more than a hundred years ago. Built the house themselves, around 1820. It took them six months just to get here to the islands. They left everyone they knew behind and didn’t know a soul when they climbed off the boat.
Thau
alone.”

Aunty Pearl had told me about the old homestead, and Keo and I went looking for it one day. The first time I’d walked through the ruins I was amazed that two young people from Massachusetts had actually sailed away from their home to a place and culture they knew nothing about. After discovering this place I spent hours on the rocks in front of my house, staring out at the ocean and wondering what was out there beyond the far horizon.

Melanie picked something out of the dirt, a chip from a blue and white plate. She cleaned it off and showed it to me. “I wonder if this was from one of their plates.”