Blue Skin of the Sea (9 page)

“White boy or Black Widow,” Jack said with finality. “You choose.”

We made it through town without getting caught, because there was no one around to catch us. The street was empty and pale under the few lights along the road. Bobby talked the whole way down to my house about what Mrs. Carvalho would do when she found the cat in her office.

Just before we got to my driveway, Jack pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the headlights. I got out and peered back into the car. Jack leaned forward, a shadowy silhouette staring past Keo at me. “Get the cat,” he said.

Keo looked away when I caught his eye, and said, “See you.”

Thick trees on either side of our rocky driveway reached out toward me, their night shadows swallowing up the moonlight. Beyond, the trail of the moon lay like a ribbon of silk on a quiet sea.

The dogs heard me and came trotting out. I crept into the house, past Dad, sleeping, and gently closed the door to my room. Except for the low hiss of the surf, the night was silent.

I sat on my bed and stared out the window, hearing the faint echo of Jack’s command—
get the cat.

A week later Grampa Joe drove down and picked up Keo, and then me, and took us back to his place to help out with his coffee orchard, a small, five-acre farm with about twenty-five hundred trees. He paid us fifty cents an hour when he needed help.

In the morning we spread rat poison around the edges of the orchard, then sprayed diesel oil in among the trees where weeds had started poking through. Later Grampa Joe wanted us to help him gather up and haul off some old boards and tires
that had cluttered his yard for as long as I could remember. Tutu Max must have gotten after him.

At noon the three of us sat out in the yard, in a small grassy area, one of several flat terraces that stumbled down from the road above. Grampa Joe’s whole place was on a hill, as was all of Kona, except down along the coast where I lived. The island itself was just the top of a deep undersea mountain rising out of the Pacific Ocean.

All morning I’d been thinking about how Keo had become so quiet and moody. Jack seemed to consume him, to consume all of us with his stories about high school, and with the fear and doubt that settled in behind them. “Forget that junk that Jack says,” I finally told Keo.

“You don’t know your brains from a dead jellyfish,” he answered, staring me down with squinting eyes.

“So what are you boys up to at school?” Grampa Joe asked.

Keo shrugged, eating one of the tuna sandwiches Tutu Max had made for us. Grampa Joe turned to me, and I shrugged, too. He kept looking at me, waiting.

“Keo’s a Black Widow,” I finally said. “It’s a gang.”

Keo held the sandwich in one hand while he ate, staring off into the trees.

Grampa Joe took a drink out of an old, dented silver thermos, then peeked over at Keo. “What do Black Widows do?”

Keo shrugged again. “Nothing … just hang around.”

Grampa Joe picked at the grass, then shook his head and laughed, once, like a
humph.
“Black Widows,” he mumbled.

“I’m going to be one, too,” I said.

“What do you mean,
going to be?”

“I have to shoot a cat first, to prove I’m worthy.”

“Sheese, are you kidding? Really? Shoot a cat? Whose stupid idea was that?” He glanced at Keo, but Keo just kept on eating his sandwich.

“A boy named Jack,” I said. “He’s the leader. It was his idea to make the Black Widows.”

Grampa Joe watched me, waiting for more. “Shoot a
cat?
”

Keo glared at me.

I looked down at the grass, thinking I’d better not say too much more. “A cat,” I said, almost in a whisper.

“You want cats? We’ll see lots of them when we take this junk to the dump,” Grampa Joe said. “No loss if you shoot one, but what a stupid idea. What does that prove? Nothing. Only that you can shoot.” He turned to Keo. “Did you have to shoot one, too?”

“No.”

“He’s a sixth grader,” I said. “So is Jack.”

Grampa Joe nodded, then shook his head and continued eating his lunch in silence, curling his blackened, diesel-oil-covered fingers around the white bread of his sandwich as if they were as clean as the inside of a mango.

On the way to the dump Grampa Joe stopped by Keo’s house so we could get the twenty-two. Boards stuck out of the back of the old car, the trunk wide open. Grampa Joe didn’t even bother to tie it down. We’d have to make two trips, there was so much stuff.

The dump was quiet when we got there, no other people around. But the dogs were out, skittish, bone-sided, emaciated creatures poking around down near the lower end. Mongooses were everywhere, scurrying from cover to cover, long and sleek, with ratty tails the length of their bodies. After we emptied out Grampa Joe’s trunk, Keo took some shots at them, hitting nothing. The noise scared the dogs off, but they slunk back when the shooting stopped.

“Sonny,” Grampa Joe said, pointing off to the right at a spot halfway down, away from the dogs and mongooses. “A cat. Hard to see right now. Wait a minute,” he said. “She’ll move.”

I squinted into the sun, then shielded my eyes with my hand. The cat moved, a spotted one, mostly orange and black, looking like it was stalking something. It picked its paws up slowly, one at a time, and held them in the air before each step

Keo handed me the twenty-two. I climbed down off the edge and picked my way through the debris, this time with a pair of thongs on my feet. Grampa Joe and Keo squatted low to the ground behind me, watching.

Like the mongoose, the cat was an easy target. I followed it in the notch, the bead on its shoulder. The wooden stock against my cheek was sun-warm and the casing smelted of clean oil, even through the stench of the dump I could have shot and joined the Black Widows immediately.

But I moved the barrel a fraction of an inch to the left and fired, missing by a foot. The cat jumped, then disappeared into the field of decaying camouflage.

“You pantie,” Keo said, standing up

Grampa Joe stayed down on his heels, laughing silently and shaking his head, as if he’d known all along that I’d never shoot the cat.

I shrugged, and said, “Missed.”

“No kidding,” Keo said, crossing his arms and turning his head to the side to spit.

Grampa Joe picked up a stick and creaked himself up then stepped down off the edge. He poked around in the garbage and came up with a rancid-smelling ribbon of something that looked like squid. “Use this,” he said, holding it out to me on the end of the stick. “Set a trap Bombye she come back—and Keo and I come back, too. Next load. You wait here, she come back.”

After the car had bounced out to the main road I picked my way down to where the cat had been. I found it in a small cave formed in the folds of a pile of cardboard boxes. Its eyes flashed out at me, like coins wrapped in cellophane. It wasn’t alone.
Four multicolored kittens shrunk back next to it as I peeked in. The mother hissed at me, and tolerated my being there as long as I didn’t move around. I squatted down and watched them, holding as still as the old refrigerator.

After a while the kittens began to get restless, creeping slowly out of the shadows into the sun. Though wary of me, they got braver, jumping over each other and spreading out around the mouth of the cave. The mother stayed where she was, her front feet tucked up under her.

I laid the squid an arm’s length away, moving as slowly as I could. Three of the kittens came over to sniff at it, one by one. The fourth wouldn’t get anywhere near it. But one of the three brave ones inched its way around the squid, coming within reach, as if it had forgotten I was there, a dirty white one, with a splatter of black and orange spots on it.

The kitten sniffed at the squid then licked it enough to see that it wasn’t fit to eat and turned its head away. Very slowly I reached out and pinched it at the back of its neck. The other kittens ran back into the cave.

Curled up and hanging from my fingers, it was as light as a plumeria lei. It struggled a little, but mostly just stayed curled up, its eyes stretched back, probably scared spitless.

I pulled my T-shirt over my head with my free hand and slipped it down my arm, then pulled the cat’s head through the sleeve. I wrapped the rest of the shirt around its body, a wad of T-shirt with a scrubby cat’s head poking out. It hissed when I let go of its neck.

When Keo and Grampa Joe returned, I was sitting on a wooden chair that I’d found. The kitten had gotten used to me by then. I stroked its head to calm it, but kept it wrapped in my T-shirt. Keo’s twenty-two lay on the ground next to the chair.

Grampa Joe laughed when he saw the kitten. “The cat shrunk,” he said.

“There are three more of these down where the big cat was.”

Grampa Joe shook his head and started taking the junk out of his trunk. Keo came over and bent down to scratch the kitten’s ears and got a hiss for it. “It’s got to get to know you first,” I said.

“What are you going to do with it?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Keep it.”

“What for?”

I shrugged.

“What about Jack?”

“He said to get a cat.”

“He said to
shoot
a cat,” Keo said.

“I know, but maybe hell change his mind.”

Keo stood up. “Jack? He won’t. Only your shooting the cat will prove anything to him. You have to do it just like he says.”

“Do
you
do everything he says?”

Keo picked up his rifle. “He hasn’t told me to do anything yet.”

“But if he did, would you? If he told you to shoot a cat, would you?”

“Easy.”

“Okay, then. How about a dog? Would you shoot one of those?” I said, pointing to the dogs nosing around in the bottom of the dump. Keo loved dogs. If he said yes, he’d be lying.

“Stupid question. I’m already a Black Widow. I don’t have to do anything.” Keo took his rifle to the car.

By the time Grampa Joe dropped me off at my house the kitten was getting pretty antsy about getting out of the T-shirt. Grampa Joe told me I’d better soak the shirt in alcohol after carrying a mangy, flea-infested dump cat around in it. His arm hung down the side of the car door, the engine idling.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ve known lots of guys like this Jack, who like to talk big and make you scared. Sometimes they were
mean pachooks, that’s for sure. But most of the time they were all smoke and no fire. Don’t let him make you do something you don’t want to do.” Then he scratched the kitten’s head and backed out to the main road.

When Dad came home from fishing, he found me sitting on the steps leading up to the porch, introducing the kitten to the dogs. I’d tied a length of nylon fishing line around its neck, like a leash, so it wouldn’t run off and get killed by a mongoose. The dogs were curious, inching up to sniff at it, but holding off when the kitten hissed at them.

Dad asked where I’d gotten it, and I told him the whole story. His eyes narrowed when I told him Jack wanted me to shoot a cat to prove I was worthy to join the gang.

“Is Keo going along with all this?” he asked.

I nodded. “He’s already a Black Widow.”

Dad stood in the yard looking up at me with his hands on his hips, wearing only shorts with shiny dried fish slime by the pockets from wiping his hands on them. “So, you were going to shoot a cat because you wanted to be a member of Jack’s gang?”

I nodded.

“Did Keo shoot one?”

“He didn’t have to. He’s a sixth grader.”

“What about Jack?”

“He winged a mongoose.”

“Everyone shoots mongooses,” Dad said. “But cats?” He paused a moment, then went on. “Why do you want to be a part of this gang, anyway?”

“For protection. Jack says we’re going to get into a lot of fights with the seventh and eighth graders. He says they carry knives.”

“You believe that?”

I shrugged. “I guess so.”

Dad stared at me, as if trying to read my thoughts. “Do you think your Uncle Harley and I would let you and Keo go to a school where the kids carried knives?”

I thought about that a moment, then shrugged and said, “I don’t know.” It had never entered my mind that Dad or Uncle Harley ever even thought about what we did at school, except ask us how our grades were once in a while.

Dad started up the steps, and put his hand on my shoulder as he passed. “If Sonny Mendoza can shoot this cat, or any cat, then I don’t know a thing about my own son.” He nudged my head with his hand. “Take that scrubby rat and soak it in the ocean until all the fleas float off, then you can bring it inside the house.”

On Monday I left home later than usual and walked slowly so I’d arrive at school just as it was starting and wouldn’t have to talk to Jack until recess.

I’d made a small dome-shaped pen out of chicken wire and staked it into the yard, a place for the cat to stay while it was getting used to its new home. I figured out that it was a female, and decided to call her
Popoki,
Hawaiian for cat. When I left the dogs were lying on the grass nearby watching her with droopy tongues, panting.

At recess, Keo came up to me before going outside. “How’s the cat?”

“Okay.”

“Jack’s expecting to see it, a
dead
cat. He doesn’t know you have a live one.”

“So.”

“So nothing. Just reminding you.”

Keo stared me in the eye a moment, then strolled off with the same disgusted look on his face he’d given Bobby Otani.

I stayed in the classroom. Keo went out to join the Black
Widows under
their
tree, a billowing monkeypod that Jack had commandeered as their meeting place. Only Black Widows and invited guests could sit under it.

Mrs. Lee asked me if I was feeling all right, and I told her that I was. She sat on a desk and studied me. “After as many years as IVe taught fifth grade boys, Mr. Mendoza, you can’t tell me that nothing is bothering you. A boy
never
stays inside at recess unless he’s sick, it’s raining, or he has a problem.”

I told her a lie and a truth. Everything was okay at school, but I was worried about my new cat. I told her I didn’t want a mongoose to get it, then went outside before she could ask too many questions.