Blue Skin of the Sea (19 page)

Filipino-style, he squatted low to the ground, feet flat, sitting with his arms on his knees, stretched out in front of him. He held the bow in his left hand.

“Lady-man,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear. He flicked his eyebrows up and down quickly, without moving another muscle in his body. “You fish like you shoot,” he said.

I pretended to ignore him and continued trying to unsnag the line.

Billy stood and came up to me, walking slowly along the top of the wall. There was no way he could pass. It was less than two feet wide. He came so close I could smell him, not a bad smell, but distinctive, tangy, like the smell of rust. Heat radiated off his body, like it comes off the side of a building in the afternoon.

Billy’s eyes could drill into you. You could see every ounce of
his power in them. The whites were clear and bright as sunlight. But the part that got you was the dark part—the deep brown-black—the iris. It almost filled the eye. They came at you like a couple of his arrows. “Why you waste time doing that?” he said.

I stopped jerking on the line and held it taut, rod bowed out over the ocean. Billy pulled a pocket knife from his fatigues and opened it, hanging his bow over his left shoulder. The line was stiff and snapped easily when he touched it with the razor-sharp blade.

I said nothing.

He took the bow off his shoulder and pulled an arrow from the small rawhide quiver attached to his belt. “I show you how.”

I backed away a couple of steps and faced him. He was left-handed and had a left-handed bow. On the right side of his belt was a length of nylon fishing line, heavy gauge, looped several times and hanging to his knee. He clipped the line to a small eye on the arrow, and set the arrow into the bow, resting it on his right thumb. Billy thought for a few seconds, then spun around and shot.

The arrow whacked a mullet in the palace pond, entering its head just behind the eyes. The mullet simply stopped all signs of life and sank.

“Look,” he said softly, in an almost fatherly way. “Easy.”

Billy pulled the fish up by the line attached to the arrow. The mullet was about a foot and a half long. He held it up close to my face.

“Look at the eyes,” he said. “He never knew I was there.” Billy pushed the dead fish off the arrow and let it fall back into the pond. The school of mullet scattered as it sank and floated back up, on its belly.

Billy looked me over. “Come, lady-man, I like show you something.” He pointed beyond me with his bow.

I’d learned that the best way to avoid trouble was to keep
from making too much eye contact, and to relax, as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on. To act perfectly calm in a tight situation seemed to let some of the air out of a threat.

I shrugged and walked along the wall in the direction he’d pointed, following the rocky shoreline through the manicured grounds of Kona Inn into a dense grove of coconut trees on the other side.

He took me to a clearing deep in the grove.

“This is good,” he said.

I heard cars driving by on the road nearby but saw nothing through the trees and brush, not even the hotel.

“Yes, this is a good place, lady-man.”

Not making eye contact was easy. But trying to act calm when you’re scared so bad your tongue goes dry is a tough thing to do.

I leaned my fishing rod against one of the trees. Billy poked with his foot at the coconuts lying in the sand under fallen palm fronds.

“You want to shoot the bow?” Billy asked. A command, not a question. I glanced around the grove for a way to run if I had to, trying not to look as scared as I felt.

“Sure,” I said, acting easy, as if I were talking to Keo. Billy smiled. I think he didn’t expect me to go for it.

“Good, lady-man. I’ll make a target.”

He handed me the bow. It was shiny, lacquered black with natural wood-grained edges, and the grip was carved to curl around a right hand. It was a lot lighter than it looked. I wondered if I was the only other person in the world to have touched it. The bow string was tight, like the feel of a one-hundred-twenty-pound test line with a five-hundred-pound marlin on it. It was beautiful, but it was a left-handed bow. The grip was off. I became aware of the low rumbling sound of waves along the rocky shoreline behind me. I should have gone spear fishing.

“Nice bow,” I said. “But I can’t shoot it. I’m right-handed.”

“How’s this?” He held up a large coconut, a dried out brown one.

“I’m right-handed,” I repeated, a little louder. “Can’t shoot a left-handed bow.”

He wasn’t listening, and wasn’t going to. I would shoot the bow. Any feelings I had of him being like any other person disappeared.

“Shoot this.” He held the coconut above his head, then pulled an arrow from his quiver and tossed it to me.

I gripped the backward bow as well as I could in my left hand, then set the feathered end of the arrow into the bowstring. I’d do what I could. I’d shot a bow before, but it had been a while.

Then I looked up to where he’d placed the target.

“What are you doing?”

“Shoot the coconut, lady-man.”

Up against the trunk of a coconut tree, Billy stood with his arms crossed in front of him … with the brown coconut sitting on his head.

I gawked at him with the arrow at rest in the bow.

“Shoot!”

“I … No … ”

I’d hit him—I’d hit him if I shoot this. Even with a right-handed bow I’d probably miss the coconut. Somebody come by, somebody please come by and break up this insane game. Somebody …

“Shoot or I’ll bust your ass! Shoot!”

He was crazy, everyone knew it. I wanted to throw the bow into the ocean and run like hell.

“Shoot!”

I lifted the bow and shot, deliberately aiming off to the right of the tree. Billy slammed the coconut to the ground and came
at me. He stared straight into my eyes, inches away, breathing hard, his breath sour, and his face tight. “One more chance, punk—one.”

Without letting up on his stare, he gave me another arrow, then walked back to the tree. He held his arms out to the side of his body as he moved. Billy put the coconut back on his head and waited.

“Okay,” he said. “Shoot.”

Again, I slipped the arrow into the bow and pulled back. The shaft felt smooth and precise as it slid slowly along my thumb.

I closed one eye, aimed at the coconut, and shot.

The arrow hit in an instant, as fast as Keo’s twenty-two. It glanced off the lower left corner of the coconut and sank into Billy’s thick hair, stopping with a thud in the coconut tree. I held my breath. If I hadn’t hit him, I’d come damn close.

Billy smiled. Slowly. He reached up and pushed the coconut off his head, and holding very still worked the arrow from the tree while keeping his eyes on me.

“Good,” he said. “Now it’s my turn.”

I lowered the bow.

It looked as if I’d barely missed him, but I didn’t feel any relief. He came toward me, stopping for a moment to pick up a much smaller coconut, about the size of a mango. He handed it to me and took back the bow.

I held the coconut at my waist and looked down at it, brushing an ant off the husk.

“On your head, lady-man. By the tree.”

My fear seemed numbed, oddly hypnotized. I walked to the tree, put the small coconut on my head, and waited.

Billy smiled and raised the bow leisurely, totally unlike the way he went after the mullet. He drew the arrow back and held it. I watched the tip move down from the target on my head, to
a point on my face, to my neck, my chest. I stood absolutely still. It wasn’t a matter of hitting the coconut. It could have been the size of a fish eye and he’d have hit it. Billy Blanchet wanted my fear.

He stepped back, still holding the arrow in the bow, and still aiming at the center of my chest. Behind me cars moaned by, muffled by the trees. Billy looked at me through one open eye, down the shaft of the arrow.

His hands seemed to be shaking, the bow moving in small jerks from side to side. Then he brought the tip of the arrow back up to my head and shot.

I closed my eyes at the very moment I heard the heavy
thwack,
then dropped to my knees, raising my hands to my head. The coconut was impaled on the tree, hit dead center, milk seeping out around the
edge
of the arrows shaft.

Billy strode up without so much as a glance at me, taking long strides. He pulled the arrow from the tree and stripped away the coconut, his skin shiny with a sheen of sweat.

Afraid to even breathe, I waited on my knees as he walked away.

For a moment the world narrowed down to the area around the back of his head. Nothing seemed to move but the weaving of his white T-shirt vanishing into the trees. I couldn’t take my eyes off the bobbing red blotch stained into the shoulder of his shirt just below a thin trail of blood that ran out of his hair down the back of his neck.

I saw him several times again, around the pier, and on the seawall shooting fish. And though a slight twinge went off in my stomach every time I saw him, I stopped crossing the street to avoid him. He seemed to have forgotten me and Keo, something we greeted with great thankfulness.

But Billy showed up at my house one Sunday, near sunset. I
was out casting off the rocks for
mot.
Dad was at the house working on his outboard, which he’d set into a fifty-gallon drum of water. The engine hummed and smoke rose out of the drum like a huge vat of boiling crabs.

I felt Billy before I saw him. I don’t know how long he’d been there, about ten yards away. He was staring into the sea with an arrow at rest in the bow. How he’d gotten there without Dad’s dogs picking up on it completely baffled me.

Billy raised his bow, aiming into the water. He stood perfectly still for long minutes, concentrating. Then slowly he pulled back on the bowstring, light and easy, as if it had the resistance of a dove’s feather. The arrow pierced the water with a small glooping sound, fishing line racing in behind it.

We both watched the point where the arrow had entered the water, the fishing line seeming to race into a hundred quivering fathoms of ocean. He seemed kind of dreamy, different from the Billy Blanchet in the coconut grove.

When the Hne went limp, he pulled it back, taking his time. He recovered the arrow and ran it between his thumb and finger to dry it. No fish.

Only after he’d detached the line and placed the arrow back into the quiver did he look over at me. He smiled and flicked his eyebrows, and said, “Missed.”

He hopped over the rocks, light and as surefooted as the dogs. He stopped a few feet away, then looked out over the water. “I’m getting out of this place,” he said after a long silence.

Back at the house Dad had shut down the outboard. I glanced back to see if he was still outside. Billy looked back at Dad, too, waiting for me to say something.

“Where are you going?”

“Any place but here.” He set one tip of his bow on his foot so it wouldn’t get scratched by the rocks, then bent the back and
disengaged the bowstring. He ran his hand along the black lacquered bow.

“Sonny,” he said, the sound of my name as startling as suddenly noticing him sitting frozen in a shadow. “Take care of this for me.”

Billy removed the quiver from his waist and gave that to me, too. Without the bow, he seemed somehow smaller.

“I got a ride on a boat, but they said I can’t take the bow. I guess they don’t trust me or something.” He paused, thinking, I suppose, about what he’d just said. Then he reached out to shake.

The last time he’d nearly crushed my hand. I hesitated, but he kept his hand out until I took it. We shook. His grip was solid, but he didn’t force it.

Billy let go and started to walk away, then stopped. His eyes drilled me again, like at the mullet pond. But this time there was no anger in them.

I stared back and he blinked, shifted his eyes, then quickly fixed them on me again.

“Punk. A lady-man would not have let me shoot at him,” he said, and walked away.

The next day Billy shipped out on a commercial tuna boat. His father was mad as hell when he found out. He stayed in Kailua for more than a week stumbling around the pier and babbling about his no-good son.

A few months later I unrolled the beautifully crafted black bow from the old canvas tarp that I kept it in. I tested its resiliency, resting an arrow against my thumb and pulling back. I took it into the trees and shot arrows into a cardboard box, wondering where Billy was, and how he was doing.

“He’s not a bad boy,” Aunty Pearl said after he’d gone. “There are just so many things that boy doesn’t know. He was
asking for help and making a mess of it, that’s all. In his heart he wanted to reach out.” And though Keo and I, and even Uncle Raz, had our doubts, she kept to that view.

Still, Billy had made me shoot an arrow at him knowing that I couldn’t handle a bow for beans. And I’d let him shoot at me. There was a lot more to it than reaching out. It was something deeper, and something warlike. And scary, even for Billy. Maybe that’s why he ran away.