Over the Rainbow - Book One - 'The Gathering Place' (15 page)

Chris was roused from his reverie by the return of
Sonny, who handed him a dewy bottle of Coke with a candy-cane straw
protruding from its top. “Dude, you hungry?” he inquired with a
knowing glance over his shoulder at the sound of the rolling ladder
in the distance. “C’mon, my treat.”

He approached the lunch counter with the same
rock-star bravado he had exhibited outside, slapping a high-five
with the brown-skinned and dreadlocked individual behind the
counter, faking the same with a small, pale white girl that was
pointedly avoiding him as she polished silverware, and began a
round of introductions with his new-found friend.

“
Yo! Bo-BEE!” he crowed. A
punkish, multiply-pierced and heavily tattooed man about Chris’ age
turned and smiled a tight smile, wiping his hands on a greasy towel
and stepping to the counter. “Bobby, here, he’s an artist, does all
the airbrush on the boards…”

Chris stared at the seemingly
never-ending swirl of color and pattern that was Bobby’s skin, his
heart skipping a beat as he noticed that many of the images seemed
strangely-
familiar.
Bobby reached across the counter for the obligatory
hand-shake, finally wrenching Chris’ gaze from his arms to his face
as Chris blurted out with an awkward smile, “Dude, I gotta ask- How
many hours do you have in all that?”

Bobby replied with a voice that was a soft contrast
to his edgy outward demeanor. With a self-deprecatory shrug he
said, “More than I can count- hundreds, I guess…“

Chris’ eyes returned to Bobby’s living canvas,
“That's amazing. Who did the artwork?”

Bobby replied softly, “I did.”

“
Seriously? All of it?”

“
Naw. Reg helped me a little with
the back- but yeah, pretty much.”

Chris’ eyes widened in appreciation, “Amazing. I
know where I'm coming when I get mine, cool.”

Bobby smiled and looked at Chris
appraisingly, studying his pristine skin with sparks of inspiration
and a hint of-
something
else
, and said, “You want one? I work
later today.”

Sonny, no longer the center of attention, added with
a nudge to Chris, “You should man, he's usually busy...” Turning to
the thin, slight girl working silently in one corner, he gestured
and said conspiratorially, “Mina here's our local
sanguinarian...”

Chris’ heart skipped a beat as he took in the
strange eyes of the girl called Mina, her irises and pupils a dark
inky black. She locked eyes with Chris for a long, silent moment,
smiled a tiny, knowing smile and then turned back to her work.
Chris’ brows furrowed in confusion as he leaned in toward Sonny and
whispered, “She’s a what?”

Sonny whispered, sotto-voce, “Dude, she thinks she's
a vampire.”

“
Oh.”

The dark, distinctly Jamaican-looking individual
with the beaded dreadlocks approached, placing two steaming plates
piled high with cheeseburgers and fries on the counter as he
engaged Chris with a wide smile. “Reg here is our local Rasta-man.
You need weed, it's his sacred sacrament.”

Reg replied coldly, staring at Sonny with a frown of
disapproval, “Don't make fun, boy. I'll end your Kama'aina
rate.”

“
Hey! Just kidding, man. Guys,
this here's- Hey! What's your name, bro?”

“
Chris.”

“
Chris. Best rookie surfer I ever
seen- and the richest. Later, Reg- Mina, keep workin' on that tan,
girl.” And with a nod, Sonny grabbed both plates and backed out of
the squeaky screen door leading to the porch beyond. Chris nodded
to his new friends in departing, snagging both Cokes from the
counter and followed with a final, hopeful backward glance to see
Alani- one that to his dark disappointment went completely
unrewarded.

Abigail hovered over the ball, wagging her club, the
delicate tip of her tongue protruding from her lips in
concentration. She took the club back ever so slightly and swung,
and with a soft click the ball hopped gently off the grass. It
bounced on the edge of the green and rolled in a long, curving
track toward the hole. It struck the flag-stick dead-center and
rattled in, and Abigail did a little happy-dance as she cried
victoriously, “Yes!”

Walter strode confidently over to the flag and
yanked it, dropping it softly on the green beside the hole. Taking
a short step to his own ball only a few feet away, he smugly tapped
it and smiled confidently as he watched it roll toward the hole,
only to see it catch the lip- and roll even further away than it
had started.

“
Oh my GOD! What
in the
hell
is
going on?” he cursed, stomping over to it and smacking it viciously
into the trees bordering the green. As he watched the ball
disappear into the shadowy jungle he muttered to himself, “For
cryin’ out loud, now I’m actually starting to
feel
like Job.”

Sonny and Chris wandered with burgers in hand along
an impromptu gallery lining one side of the porch, autographed
pictures both old and new of famous surfers, actors and various
other celebrities that had visited over the years. Sonny took a
long drink of his soda and nodded to one, a cracked and yellowing 8
X 10 of a smiling native man with an enormous vintage surfboard.
“...so anyway, this guy, Eddie Aikua, he died in '78. He was a
lifeguard here at Waimea for years- they even named the surf
tournament after him.”

Beside that was a faded, plastic covered newspaper
clipping, a strangely familiar face beaming with pride gazing back
at them. The headline at the top read-

"Local Youth Captures Surfing Competition"

"...Sonny Nakamura, 13, rode the ride of his life
today at Pipeline, narrowly beating out riders almost twice his
age..."

Chris looked over at the now widely-grinning Sonny,
a shock of realization crossing his face as he discovered who his
surfing buddy was.

“
So, you're-”

“
Yep. Bin surfin' since before I
could walk. My bruddah Buddy used to take me out before I could
even swim.”

Sonny drained his soda, washing down the last of the
burger, and pointed out to some impressive waves that were crashing
to the shore. “Dude- Surf's up... Wanna go 'break' in your new
board?”

Chris replied with a quick, backward glance to the
door, “Uh- sure.”

As Sonny and Chris walked back to
their surfboards, Alani watched through the binoculars, this time
not-so-guiltily focusing on the tanned form of Chris. She couldn’t
explain why. It wasn’t like he was the first, and certainly not the
only tourist who had ogled her. And she couldn’t really blame him
for trying for an eyeful up-skirt as she was on the ladder; the
short plumeria-print mini-dress just barely extended below her
hips- that was kind of the idea. But there was just
something-
different
, about him, something that nagged at her core, a spark of
something that had ignited the moment they met on the road, and
fanned into flame when he first saw her at the counter. And now it
consumed her attentions, and she wanted to know
why
.

As the boys plucked their boards from the sand, a
whistle was heard, bird-like, distinct, and Sonny turned his head
toward its source. At the edge of the beach, beneath a small clump
of dragon-wood trees whose tangled roots carved out a small space
away from the rest of the crowd, a skinny, tattooed Hawaiian youth
waved a small white object leeringly in front of his face.

Sonny hesitated, thrusting his board back into the
sand, “Uh- Yo, Chris! You go on out ahead, get some practice, eh? I
be right out, okay?” And with that, he sauntered over to the group
beneath the trees. Chris shook his head and frowned, and waded into
the water.

Alani waved to the handsome Danish couple who were
exiting the store, and then quickly grabbed the binoculars again as
the door tinkled and closed. Focusing on the water, she easily
located the golden-blond curls of Chris bobbing through the waves-
but Sonny wasn’t with him. Lowering the binoculars with a frown,
she raised them up again and swept her gaze along the beach, trying
to seek out her absent brother. Her view panned back and forth,
finally coming to rest on a small group of kids, two girls and a
boy whose back was similar to Sonny. She focused, and immediately
realized it was not him. Again she swung the magnified view along
the beach, this time along the trees, sharpened the focus, but
again was unsuccessful in her search. Panning slowly along the
tree-line, her breath caught as she finally located her wayward
brother, not because of her success of finding him, but because of
whom she found sitting next to him.

Manolo Kapu’ana, local thug and notorious
drug-dealer, passed a smoking joint to Sonny and leaned back as the
smoke trickled from his grinning mouth. Sonny lie propped up on one
elbow, lying casually in the sand, and as she watched, he took a
huge hit and immediately began coughing explosively, silently,
laughing and wiping tears from his eyes as he rose, gang-style
hand-shakes all around. And then Alani’s heart sank and she felt
almost sick as she watched Sonny reach into his board shorts and
haul out a huge wad of money and hand it to Manolo, who pocketed it
with almost sleight-of-hand stealthiness as he traded Sonny a large
Ziplock bag in return.

In anger and frustration at her
impotence of distance, Alani tore the binoculars from her eyes and
a flood of conflicting emotions twisted her delicate features into
a tortured mask of concern. Her gaze swung from the dusty window to
the wall beside the counter, the number of the local police plainly
visible on a stained and dirty business card.
Shit!
she thought, unsure of what to
do. She couldn’t bust Manolo, that would only implicate Sonny, but
the fact that her brother’s football career would be devastated if
the knowledge of his blatant drug purchase got out bothered her
more than the use itself.

She knew that he smoked, that he bought pot from Reg
almost weekly, but that had always been ohana, a family thing, and
this was different. Keeping his use private, insulated within the
folds of ohana, the Hawaiian’s extended notion of family that
embraced more than just blood, was almost a sacred thing, one never
to be violated. But for Sonny to be branching out to the beach, a
public beach at that, full of tourists and the occasional roving
cops was a bad choice, and just the mere presence of Manolo selling
dope a stone’s throw away from the store was more than cause for
concern. It was something that transcended the bonds of family, of
ohana, and conversely, directly affected the bounds of ohana
extended to this act, if merely to preserve the family and its’
future.

And Sonny truly
had
a bright future. The
star half-back and defensive corner for the Kahuku Red Raiders,
Sonny was already being scouted at a young age, his prowess as just
a Sophomore on par to set state records by the time he graduated.
In sum, Sonny had a chance, a
real
chance, of escaping this rock and moving on to
better things, things that Alani had always longed for and had
never been able to pursue. Things that because of her own steadfast
devotion to the bonds of ohana were trumping her own inner desires
and quashing her dreams of something more, something that she knew
lay beyond the rainbow.