Blue Skin of the Sea (5 page)

Uncle Raz ignored him. “Hard, but not impossible,” he said.

“What’s the weight?” Aunty Pearl called from the truck, which was parked far enough away that she couldn’t hear what Uncle Harley and Uncle Raz were saying.

Dad called over to Aunty Pearl, “Three sixty-two.”

“Hooo-ie!” she said.

“Okay, now what,” asked Uncle Raz, in a low, mumbling voice.

Uncle Harley turned his back to Aunty Pearl. “Don’t worry,” he said. Then he called to Dad to get some more beer.

I went with him, following him down to Taneguchi’s market. We walked slowly, the pavement of the pier warm under my bare feet. How would Dad feel if he were in Uncle Harley’s shoes, if Aunty Pearl were
my
mother? Would
be
make a bet
about her? Dad hardly ever talked about my mother, and I was starting to wonder why.

“Dad,” I said, just before we reached the store, “what do you think about Uncle Harley and Uncle Raz making a bet about Aunty Pearl?”

At first he just kept on walking. When we went into the bright lights of the market, he said, “None of my business what Harley does, but PU tell you this: he wouldn’t do anything to hurt Pearl.”

Dad pulled two six-packs of Oly out of the cooler and headed to the cash register as if everything in life was as it should be.

When we returned with the beer, Uncle Harley walked over to us. “If we’re not home soon, nosy Max is going to come poking around.” He looked down the road that ran along the seawall.

Uncle Raz came over for the beer. “She’s had eight beers already. Pretty soon she’s going to want to get out of the truck.”

Keo and I were beginning to figure the whole thing out. Aunty Pearl hardly ever got out of the truck when we went to the pier. But when she had too many beers she became extremely happy and would do unexpected things. We found that out one night when we’d all gone to a big luau down at Kahaluu beach. Aunty Pearl gave us each a beer, which she’d never have done in her right mind.

The plan was simple. Get Aunty Pearl full of beer, step number one. Then for sure she’d want to get out of the truck to take a long, slow walk on the pier with Uncle Harley. She loved to do that. The key to the whole thing was in her wanting to get out of the truck. There was really only one way to do it: the fish hoist. And while Uncle Harley was lifting her from the truck, someone would just happen to look up at the scale.

Keo climbed into the truck and sat near his mother. I glared at Uncle Harley whenever I got the chance to catch his eye.

By eight o’clock Aunty Pearl had downed three more beers and was starting to laugh at anything anyone said. Uncle Har-ley squeezed onto the seat next to her with one leg hanging over the side of the truck. He told jokes and wild stories, his arm around Aunty Pearl’s neck. With his free hand he gave her beer from a cooler that he’d brought from the house. Dad and Uncle Raz shared the new six-packs.

Aunty Pearl seemed to roll in one continuous laugh. I was beginning to think that Uncle Harley had forgotten all about his plan.

Then he dropped down to the pier and stretched and called Keo and me over to him. “Run down to the end of the pier and see if Tutu Max is anywhere in sight,” Uncle Harley whispered.

It was almost too dark to tell, but Keo was pretty sure that no one was coming. Just as we started back to the truck, I saw Tutu Max’s car moving slowly past Emma’s Store. I followed Keo and didn’t tell anyone.

Aunty Pearl was standing in the, truck.

“Come on, Mama,” Uncle Harley said, “it’s a nice night for a walk on the pier.”

The color from the sunset had slipped away. The sky was black. Only two lamps cast yellow cones of light to the concrete, one above the fish scale.

Uncle Harley handed her another beer from the cooler and she guzzled it down in one take, as if it were guava juice. Dad turned away, shaking his head. I think he never stopped being amazed by his brothers. Aunty Pearl told me Dad was always the quiet one, the Mendoza boy who always did everything right. When Uncle Raz and Uncle Harley were boys, she said, they were fighting with each other all the time. But Dad was the nice one. He never got anyone’s feathers up. That’s why the most beautiful girl in the islands married him, she said. “She loved him so much, Sonny. And I never heard your daddy say
an unkind word to her.” It always made Aunty Pearl cry when she thought of my mother. “She was one of my
best
friends,” she’d often tell me. And though some people made a big deal out of what race you were, Aunty Pearl had never cared that my mother was Caucasian, a
haole.
Aunty Pearl had a gentleness, something that came up and hugged you.

“Okay, Daddy, okay. How you going get me down?” Aunty Pearl said.

“Raymond, bring the chain,” Uncle Harley called to Dad. “Raz, make the crossbar.”

Uncle Raz pushed and slapped at Alii, who was lying on the crowbar in the truck. Alii snorted back at him, and dragged himself up. Uncle Raz wove a loop with a short length of rope and tied it to the crowbar at its midpoint. He then threw the loop over the giant hook at the end of the chain hanging from the fish scale. Dad pulled the hoist and raised the crowbar until it was even with the bed of the truck. Uncle Harley laid it at Aunty Pearl’s feet.

“Okay, Mama. Stand on the bar, one foot on either side and hold tight to the chain. We’ll lift you out.”

Aunty Pearl moved her huge feet into position, giggling. Uncle Harley kissed her on her forehead. “You ready, Mama?”

I glanced down toward the seawall. Tutu Max and Grampa Joe had just turned onto the pier and were driving toward us with one headlight busted and the other one aimed up into the trees. “Uncle,” I said. “We got company.”

Uncle Harley groaned. Aunty Pearl looked off toward the one-eyed car.

Tutu Max pulled up alongside the truck and got out. “Why you still down here? What’s going on? What you doing, Pearl?”

“Just getting out of the truck,” Uncle Harley said quickly, all innocent.

Uncle Raz tried to keep from laughing.

“What you laughing at?” Tutu Max demanded, staring at
Uncle Raz. She was a good foot shorter than him, but a lot heavier. She took to him almost as poorly as she took to Uncle Harley. There’s got to be something wrong, she said a thousand times to Uncle Raz, with a twenty-eight-year-old man who still has no wife.

Uncle Raz sobered up some and took a step backward to put some distance between himself and Tutu Max. She wasn’t against using her hands to emphasize a point.

“Nothing, nothing,” he said, spreading out his arms.

Tutu Max pushed by, giving Uncle Raz a shove as she passed. He fell backward, and then disappeared. I heard a plopping sound and ran to the edge of the pier. Uncle Raz popped up and reached for the truck tires that were lashed alongside the pier. Dad laughed and reached a hand down to help him.

Uncle Harley held his serious look through the whole thing.

“What’s going on here, Pearl honey?” Tutu Max asked.

“Nothing, Mama. I just coming down to walk on the pier with Daddy.”

“You know you have to take it easy, baby. You have to watch … ”

“S’okay, Mama. I just coming down to walk.”

Uncle Raz pulled himself up onto the pier and squatted down to squeeze the water from his clothes.

Uncle Harley said, “Okay, Mama. Hold tight and we’ll bring you down.”

“Wait a minute,” demanded Tutu Max. “What’s she standing on? Let me see. What if it breaks?”

Uncle Harley bent down and pulled the crowbar from under Aunty Pearl’s feet.

“I want to try it first, from down here,” Tutu Max said.

A very slight glance from Uncle Harley to his brothers laid out the whole turn of events. Dad lowered the chain. Uncle Raz stationed himself where he could take a peek at the scale. Uncle
Harley placed the crowbar on the concrete and Tutu Max stepped onto it. Dad raised her a few inches off the ground. Uncle Raz glanced at the scale and lifted an eyebrow, but kept a straight face.

Tutu Max scowled at Uncle Harley. “Okay,” she said. Dad lowered her back to the pier. All this time Grampa Joe sat in the car with his door open.

With everyone offering assistance, we lowered Aunty Pearl to the pier, slowly, like the empress that she was.

It was about ten-thirty by the time we finally got her back home. Tutu Max went off with Grampa Joe to their place up the hill. Alii lumbered off the truck and headed straight for his mud hole.

Uncle Harley backed his truck up to the ramp, then climbed into the back and took Aunty Pearl’s hand. She stood and smiled down at Keo and me. I half-smiled back, then stared at the ground.

Aunty Pearl started chuckling in the warm glow of the lone yard light.

“Boys,” she said, and I looked back up at her. “Come to the house for a minute.”

I followed Keo, both of us walking slowly behind Uncle Harley and Aunty Pearl. Uncle Harley left us on the porch.

Aunty Pearl lowered herself onto her porch chair. “Boys,” she said, then paused to catch her breath. She laughed. “Boys, you look so sad.” She giggled again. “Go look in the cooler in the truck. Have a beer from it,” she said, then shooed us away with her hands.

Dad, Uncle Harley, and Uncle Raz stood along the fence, looking into Alii’s pen. Keo and I stopped at Uncle Harley’s truck and peeked into the cooler. Keo popped open a bottle with his thumb, the cap on loosely.

Water. Every beer bottle in the cooler was filled with water.

She
knew
—the whole time.

Uncle Harley was a lifetime smarter than Uncle Raz, and me, for that matter.

Dad motioned for me to come over next to him. Then we all turned to Uncle Raz, waiting:
what did she weigh?

Uncle Raz scratched his chin, then rubbed the back of his neck, then looked down and kicked at the dirt. Sometimes he drove me
crazy.

Finally, he said, “Maxine was two sixty-eight.” Then, in a low voice, added, “Pearl made three forty-seven.”

“Hah!” Uncle Harley said, slapping the fence. I wanted to go stand right up next to him, I felt so good. But I just stood there.

Uncle Raz rested on the fence, his arms on the top rail, staring into the pigpen.

“S’okay, Raz,” Uncle Harley said. “You can pay me tomorrow.” He tapped Dad’s back and winked at me.

Uncle Raz just kept on staring.

Alii snorted, then let out a long wheeze like a sigh.

Dad pushed himself away from the fence and started back to the truck. Uncle Raz and I followed.

A silky, clean offshore breeze rustled through the trees around the pigpen, and the metallic smell of nighttime coolness rose from the soil, and from the grass in the pastures. It had suddenly grown very quiet as islands at night seem to do. The three of us climbed into the front of Uncle Raz’s Toyota and inched away in first gear, silent as fish.

I turned and looked back. Keo was crouching beside his father at the pigpen fence. Uncle Harley reached down and scratched Alii’s ears, just like he scratched old Bullet’s.

Aunty Pearl was right about the Mendoza boys. If they grew up, they’d just get cranky.

Keo and I sat on the end of the pier on an old truck tire watching two huge sharks swim backward. When they got out about fifty or sixty feet they stopped dead in the water and stayed there, like two gray torpedoes frozen in place just under the surface of the ocean.

“Looks funny, yeah?” Keo said.

I shook my head. It was one of the strangest-looking things I’d ever seen.

The old man in the open fifteen-foot fishing skiff just off the end of the pier sat down again and waited for the sharks to return. He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his face on the sleeve of his torn khaki shirt.

“You think he’s ever seen a real shark?” Keo asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Out in the skiff the old man fanned his face with his hat.

“Looks fake,” Keo said. “If that was a real shark he’d be a lot more worked up about it than
that.”

“Yeah.”

“They should use real sharks, not those fake ones. Look.” He pointed to the underwater cables running from the two motionless sharks to the pier. “Everyone’s gonna know those are fake.”