Blue Skin of the Sea (22 page)

Deeps looked at me and lifted the jaw, tapping it with a
finger. “This guy,” he said, “probably never would have hurt anyone … lazy things. But you never can tell—you never can tell.”

I looked down at the fleshy bone, the knifelike teeth.

“You know the shark I was telling you about,” he went on, “the one that ate the Hawaiian guy? Scared the piss out of me.” He touched the jaw again. “Look nice when it’s clean.” He was so close I could see tiny specs of dried blood on his arm.

He handed me the jaw, holding it at the joint, away from the teeth. “Leave it out,” he said. “Mongoose clean off the meat. Then bleach ‘urn in the sun, bombye come nice.”

The jaw was heavy with seven rows of razor teeth, the bone slick with dangling cartilage.

“Let’s go,” Deeps said to Keo.

Keo was staring at the shark jaw, and jumped when Deeps spoke.

“Sure,” Keo said.

He started toward the Jeep, then stopped and squinted at me. “You crack ‘urn up, you pay,” he said, and threw the keys on the ground by my feet.

Until high school the harbor, the village, ten to fifteen miles of coast, and the sea made up my world.

I’d seen the island a thousand times from the sea, fishing with Dad, a bluish mass of earth, crowned with clouds and dotted with rooftops high on the jungled rise of its steep flanks. The rest of Hawaii could just as well have been Zanzibar, for all I’d really known of it.

The high school was deep in the upper midlands, a half-hour ride on a crowded school bus, and worlds away from the sea. Life was different up there, not easy like down in the village. It was tough if you managed to get on the wrong side of someone. And to make things worse, I was a white fishboy punk from down by the ocean, which to some was worse than being from California. Most people, though, just minded their own business.

But then, there was Rudy Batakan.

We were in the same grade, though we’d never spoken to each other until one day far into our junior year. I was out on the football
field with a couple of friends during a class break. Rudy and four other guys walked up to us with their greased-back hair and bell-bottomed pants billowing out around their ankles so far you couldn’t see their feet.

Rudy looked me over. “Eh, you stink like one fish. You one fish or what?” he asked in the pidgin English he spoke,
fab
coming out
Wkzfeesb.
Then he smiled, which threw me off. Was he clowning around or trying to start something?

“Barracuda,” I said, hoping he was joking.

Rudy smirked. “Lissen, sissy punk,” he said, jabbing me in the chest with his finger. “The new
baole
girl—don’t mess wit’ her.” He glared at me, then smiled, a mean smile. “You mess wit’ her, I mess wit’ you.”

One of his friends snickered. “Eh, Rudy. No scare him so much he make shee-shee pants.” Everyone but Rudy laughed.

Rudy’s face was less than a foot from mine, so close I could smell his hair grease. He poked me again, but not as hard. “No forget, eh?” he said, then strolled off with his pack.

I didn’t even know the new girl’s name. I’d seen her around, and once said hello to her. That’s all.

From then on Rudy made a point of noticing me, always saying things like, “Eh,
baole
punk, howzit?” I wanted to say, “Fine,
manong
punk,”
manong
being an unfriendly word for Filipino.

One morning before school Rudy passed by Keo and me and said, “Howzit, shee-shee pants.” As always, a couple of guys were with him.

Keo snapped around. “Who you calling shee-shee pants?”

Rudy stopped, stunned. He glared at me, then at Keo. “Who said that?”

Keo stepped closer to Rudy. “I did.”

Rudy’s friends moved up beside him. “I calling that punk one fah-king
baole
shee-shee pants,” he said. “What’choo care?”

“If he’s one fah-king
baole
shee-shee pants, then you one fah-king
manong
shee-shee pants,” Keo said, mimicking the way Rudy spoke.

“Wait,” I said. “It’s okay.” I put my hand on Keo’s shoulder, but he shrugged it away.

Rudy nosed up to Keo and pushed him back with his palms, his friends closing in behind.

Keo slugged him in the face.

Rudy reeled back and covered his nose with both hands. “You broke my nose!” he yelled, bent over. Tears flooded the edges of his eyes.

Two of his army made a move toward us but held off when a friend of Keo’s stepped in.

I grabbed Keo’s arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

He let me pull him away, but kept his eyes on Rudy’s friends. Rudy broke through the crowd and headed into the building, a bloody hand over his nose.

He stayed away from school for a week after that, and when he returned the skin around his eyes was yellowy-purple.

Keo gave me a golf ball and told me to keep it with me at all times and squeeze it until my arm ached, then rest and start squeezing again. It would put muscle into my punch. He also told me to practice slamming thé side of my fist into my stomach to make it hard. “You can’t trust a punk like Rudy,” Keo said. “Especially when he thinks you’re fooling around with his girlfriend.”

“But I don’t even know her.”

“Doesn’t matter. Rudy thinks you do.”

I kept away from Rudy until the school year ended. He was like one of those dogs that stand perfectly still as you approach, watching you, and if you look them in the eye they snap and go crazy.

∗    ∗    ∗

That summer between my junior and senior year, I got a job running a small, thatch-roofed, glass-bottomed catamaran, which I kept in a corner of the cove next to the pier.

Keo was on his own now, out of high school. He went to work as Uncle Raz’s deckhand. He and Cheryl Otani were still going strong and were talking about getting married. Keo planned to get a boat like Uncle Raz’s and fish for marlin.

Dad wanted me to work with him on the
Ipo,
fishing the tuna grounds. But I couldn’t see spending day after day roasting on a hot boat in the middle of the ocean. I wanted to stay near town, near people. But I told Dad I wanted the glass-bottom boat job so I could learn the names of all the fish I didn’t know. Dad said that was a good idea, and went on with his routine alone.

The glass-bottom boat business ran smoothly until the pad-dlers came.

I’d been keeping the cat beached in the cove at night, and stowing its ten-horse outboard in a storage room at King Kam Hotel. The sand on the small, white, half-moon beach was so fine it ran through your fingers like dream dust. Most of the time nothing much happened there beyond the noisy chatter of small kids splashing in the shallows and the occasional beaching of a skiff. In the mornings, I hammered a sign into the sand next to the boat: “Hawaiian Glass-Bottom boat rides, $5.00 per person, per hour,” then sat around squeezing the golf ball and punching my stomach until someone wanted to go out.

Late one afternoon I came in from a two-hour tour down the coast with three ladies from England. When we puttered back into the cove, the paddlers were spread out over the beach, sitting in small groups and milling around the palm trees, forty or fifty canoe club kids waiting for practice to start.

After I ran the cat up onto the sand, the ladies got out and went off toward the pier. I straightened up the boat and watched the paddlers out of the corner of my eye. I knew most
of them from school, though not very well. Many lived in the highlands and didn’t spend much time down in the village.

I grabbed the sponge and bucket out of the stern and headed over for some fresh water.

Off to my left I noticed a small group of older paddlers silting in the dappled shade of a clump of palm trees, four boys and two girls. One of the girls was blond, her hair tied back in a pony tail, white plumerias floating in the gold just above her left ear—the new girl. And next to her, Rudy.

He glared down at me, the sleeves on his white T-shirt rolled up to show off his homemade tattoo. “What’choo looking at, fishboy?”

I kept walking toward the hotel.

“Eh! Punk! I talking to you. What’choo looking at, I said?”

I stopped and turned. The new girl looked away as if embarrassed. But the rest of them gave me pretty solid stink eye.

“Me? Fm just going to get some fresh water.” Rudy the creep playing King of the Beach.

“No lie, you fahkah,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Sorry,” Rudy mimicked. His friends got a pretty big kick out of it.

I walked away.

The paddling coach arrived and the kids swarmed over to the canoes and carried them gently down to the water. I filled the bucket and started back to the cat to wash the salt off the seats. How was I going to share the beach with Rudy for the next couple of months?

One afternoon about two weeks after the paddlers had shown up, I was drifting with a man and two old ladies in the cat, just outside the entrance to Thurston’s Harbor, a man-made lagoon carved out of the rocky shoreline, sinking back into a mysterious private estate.

“See that fish just above the cauliflower coral,” I said to the ladies. They were great, kept saying, “Yes, oh yes, I see,” and “Isn’t that nice.” The man mostly sat there nodding with his arms crossed.

“That’s called a
kikakapunukunukuoioi”
I said, knowing that I would impress them with a name that took me nearly a week to master.

And then a body appeared below the glass—long waving blond hair undulating outward, like delicate strings of sea grass.

The new girl.

“Oh my … ” one of the ladies said, “a mermaid.” The man unfolded his arms and bent in over the box.

The girl dove to the bottom and found a red sea star, then brought it up to us under the glass. She wore no face mask, but looked up with her eyes open, small bubbles of air escaping from the
edge
of her mouth. Loose strands of hair moved across her face, and billowed outward as she rose and hung below us.

Then she laughed, letting out a blast of bubbles that stuck to the bottom of the glass. When they cleared, she was gone. She popped up a few yards off the stern, waved, and swam toward the rocky shore.

“Is that your girlfriend?” one of the ladies asked.

“No,” I said. “I’ve seen her around, but I don’t know her.”

“Well,” she said, “it looks as if she’s trying to tell you something.”

The ladies giggled.

I shook my head. “Naah … naah.”

But from then on there was hardly a minute in my life that wasn’t filled with the memory of her smiling face looking up at me under the glass-bottom boat. I had it pretty bad, like I did with Melanie McNeil when I practically camped out at the post office waiting for letters that would never come. Feelings just
rose up on their own, feelings that made my whole world seem different—brighter—
much
brighter. I began to hate weekends, when no paddlers came to the cove, when I had to spend two days straight without a chance to catch a glimpse of the one I now called Rudy’s girl.
Was
she Rudy’s girl?

I saw her standing next to a canoe one day, getting ready to go out with the girls crew. I slowed the cat to a crawl and crept slowly into the cove and up to the beach, coming as close to the canoe as I dared, risking a warning from the coach.

“Hi,” I said to her as I passed. She smiled and looked right at me, into my eyes.

When she came back from the practice run, she waded by the cat, wavelets arrowing out from her knees. She bunched her wet T-shirt at the bottom and squeezed the water from it. I was sitting in the boat under the thatch roof, one foot in the water and the other propped up on the rim of the glass box, listening to a transistor radio. I was feeling pretty good.

She threw her hair back and rolled it up like a towel on the side of her head—a luxurious gesture. She came up to the cat and stood playing with her hair, though for only a moment. Her eyes darted up toward Rudy, then back to me.

“Meet me here Friday night at seven-thirty,” she said in a low voice, almost whispering. She looked into my eyes.

Just then, Rudy shouted. “Eh, Shelley, come on.”