Blue Skin of the Sea (18 page)

It’s not that I hated Billy Blanchet, though at times I thought I did. “Somebody made a mistake,” Uncle Raz had told Keo and me. “That boy belongs on another planet.”

Billy was seventeen, three years older than me, and taller by at least three inches. And solid, with lots of muscle—sharp, molded chest, rippled stomach, and arms with protruding veins. He was of mixed blood, probably Hawaiian-French-Portuguese-Filipino, and maybe a little Japanese.

Many times I’d watched him fish with his bow and arrow off the seawall, crouching low, and studying the ocean, his eyes pinned on what he was after. When he crept in to strike, you didn’t see a boy, you saw a cat. Quick, fluid, graceful. Physically, Billy Blanchet was everything I wanted to be.

He drifted around the harbor, appearing on the pier, then disappearing, and showing up somewhere else. At times he’d startle me when I’d suddenly notice him sitting still as stone against the wheel of a Jeep, or squatting in the
broken shade of a palm tree, like a lizard hiding in the grain of a rock. He was always alone, and never without his bow.

The word around Kailua was that he was unpredictable, “unstable” Uncle Raz called him. Some people said it was just a matter of time. He’d be in prison before he was twenty-five, just like his brother.

What amazed me was that he could put an arrow through a fish ten yards off the seawall. He’d stand perfectly still for five or ten minutes watching fish move beneath the surface, becoming to them a tree or a rock. Then in the moment he seemed to be waiting for, he’d swing the bow up to his cheek and shoot with only the hint of an aim. He must have missed a time or two, but I only saw him do it once.

For several months now, ever since meeting Billy up at Keo’s house, I’d started feeling almost sick inside at the way I’d try to disappear whenever I saw him. He hadn’t threatened me, or even challenged me. I’d just left Keo’s house
thinking
he had.

I’d gone there with Dad to put some fresh
ahi
in Uncle Harley’s icehouse. The day was dry and hot. When Dad turned off the Jeep the place was so quiet I could hear old Alii grunting softly in his pigpen. The engine snapped and clicked as it cooled down. Dad went into the house to find Uncle Harley.

It was
too
quiet. No dogs. Bullet and Blossom were gone.

Aunty Pearl stood in the doorway. “Keo and Billy down Suva’s lower pasture,” she said,. She smiled and started back inside.

“Wait. What Billy?”

“A boy from Kainaliu. Somebody Keo knows from school.” Her smile faded. “He going stay with us for a while.” Aunty Pearl went back into the house without telling me to come give her a hug. I didn’t remember any Billy Keo knew at school.

I found them near an old, rusty steel water trough under a
towering mango tree in Silva’s lower pasture. They were shooting at a piece of cardboard tacked to the tree. Someone had drawn three circles on it, target style. Keo was using Uncle Harley’s twenty-two and Billy his bow. Suva’s cows were clumped together downhill, staring at them from the corner of the pasture.

“Keo,” I called, squeezing through the barbed-wire fence. Bullet and Blossom started a wave of barking, and ran over with their tails wagging.

The barking startled Billy. He spun around quickly and glared over at me from the shadow of the mango tree.
That
Billy.

“Aay, Sonny,” Keo called. “Come shoot.” He turned back toward the tree and fired off a round, but Billy kept his eyes on me. He wore a white T-shirt and camouflage army fatigues. Barefoot, like Keo and me.

“This is Billy,” Keo said after I’d crossed the pasture. “He ran away from home.”

Billy studied me.

He had a large bruise on his cheek and a cut on his arm, just above the elbow. It was scabby, and had stitches in it. A conspicuous scar slashed through his left eyebrow, a thin river of flesh where hair should have been.

I’d seen him at school, mostly lurking around by himself. He didn’t have any friends that I knew of. He was too
weird.
But I guess Keo, being only a tenth grader, felt pretty big about having an eleventh grade friend.

I reached out to shake as Dad had told me to do whenever I met someone. Billy didn’t move. I was just about to drop my hand when he grabbed it. His grip was incredible, like pliers.

“Sheese!” I said, trying to pull my hand away. But he wouldn’t let go.

“Billy!” Keo said.

Billy let up on the pressure, then let go, and smiled. “You shake like a lady,” he said.

I rubbed my hand and glanced over at Keo, then back at Billy. There was no way to answer an insult like that without starting a fight. Already I hated him.

“Are you a lady or a man?” Billy asked. His voice sounded strangely soft, not edgy or irritating, like you’d think it would be. His words cut ice-pick deep but his tone was almost soothing. When neither Keo nor I answered, he said, “I know, you’re a lady-man,” then snickered at his own clever words.

Keo held his rifle sideways across his chest, barrel pointing up into the leaves. It was so quiet at that altitude you could hear mosquitoes. Keo and I waited, neither of us knowing what to do.

Billy shifted. “Lady-man, watch.”

He backed away from the target, fifty or sixty feet. Keo and I moved to the side as Billy set an arrow into the bow and stood holding it in place with one hand, point to the ground.

For at least thirty seconds he concentrated on the target, never even blinking his eyes. He raised the bow and shot. I barely saw him pull back the bowstring. The arrow thwacked into the tree and vibrated. As much as I didn’t like Billy, I was speechless with awe when I saw that he’d hit the target dead center.

Keo and I must have looked paralyzed. Billy laughed, not in a chilling way, but a laugh that sounded like he wasn’t that bad.

Billy held the bow out to me. “You want to try?”

“No, but I’ll shoot the twenty-two.”

Keo handed me the rifle and I walked back to where Billy had shot from. I tried to imitate what Billy had done, raising the rifle quickly, and shooting without aiming.

I missed the target
and
the tree.

The horn on Dad’s Jeep honked, and the dogs ran toward the house. “I have to go,” I said. “See you, Keo.” I glanced at Billy
and nodded. He flicked his eyebrows and said, “Better put some muscle into that hand.”

Billy stayed with Aunty Pearl and Uncle Harley for a week before his father came looking for him. Mr. Blanchet, Aunty Pearl had learned from Billy’s mother, had a problem with drinking, a big problem, getting drunk and beating up on Billy, like he’d done to Billy’s older brother. Billy’s mother cried when she’d spoken to Aunty Pearl, painfully thankful that her son had somewhere to go.

But Mr. Blanchet found out where Billy was and came to get him in the middle of the night.

When Billy heard the pounding on the door he snapped out of bed and ran from one side of Keo’s room to the other, back and forth, looking for a place to hide. Uncle Harley was Out night fishing with Uncle Raz, and Aunty Pearl had to get up and quiet the noise. Keo said he thought the door would crash down into the house. It scared him so much his heart nearly pounded out of his chest.

Aunty Pearl told Billy’s father to settle down, but he was too far gone to reason with. He pushed by her and stumbled into every room in the house looking for Billy. Keo said the whites of his eyes were yellow, and he smelled like two weeks on a tuna boat without a bath.

Billy rolled under his bed and curled up against the wall just before his father busted into Keo’s room and started tearing the place apart. He pulled the bed out and flipped it over. The first thing he did was slug Billy in the face and tell him to get back home where he had things to do. Keo said the sound of Mr. Blanchet’s fist hitting Billy’s cheek made him sick to his stomach. Aunty Pearl tried to stop him but could only slow him down by pushing and moving her body between them. Billy ran out behind her.

Aunty Pearl cried for hours that night, Keo said. And it took days to get rid of the scent of Billy’s father.

Less than a month later Billy ran away again, this time staying somewhere else. His mother called Aunty Pearl, but none of us knew where he was, except that Uncle Raz had seen him around the pier a couple of times, fishing with his bow. We figured he was living off what he caught.

Keo pointed Billy’s father out to me one day when he saw him coming out of the bar at Ocean View Inn. Uncle Harley told us to steer clear of him. He was sour enough when he was sober, and he might even accuse us of hiding Billy.

One afternoon, about three weeks after we’d heard that Billy had run away again, I was down at the pier waiting for Dad to come in from fishing. The white sky and muggy air made the insides of my arms sticky, a hot, thick day, the kind where you never get to feeling comfortable. I went over to the cove on the far side of the pier and sank down into the ocean to cool off. When I came up out of the water I saw a man lying on his side, curled under a palm tree just above the beach.

There were always one or two strangers hanging around town, “bums” Uncle Raz called them, wandering men, mostly. Keo and I usually left them alone, though sometimes we’d talk to them because they almost always had wild stories to tell of places they’d seen and trouble they’d had. But this man didn’t seem like one of them. He wasn’t as grimy as they were.

I crept up to the palm tree, keeping my distance, studying the still body, wondering if the man was more dead than alive. His chest rose and fell slowly behind his knees, which were pulled up close to him, his hands between them.

He mumbled something, then opened his eyes to a strained squint. He tried to get up. An ugly splotch of dried blood swelled above his left eye. He fell back down and groaned.

“Mister,” I said, from a few feet away. “Are you all right?”

The man mumbled again and rolled his eyes up at me. He reached out a hand, but I backed away when I saw that he was Billy’s father.

“Do you need help?” I asked. “Sh-should I get some help?”

“Boy … ”he said, then he fell back.

I moved closer, keeping just out of reach, and could see that he’d passed out. He smelled like beer, worse than beer, whiskey or something, and sweat. He must have gotten into a fight.

“Mister,” I said.

When he didn’t move, I went around behind him and lifted him to a sitting position, leaning him against the tree, then ran over to Dad’s Jeep and got an old rag. I soaked it in fresh water from a spigot on the pier.

He woke up while 1 was dabbing at the blood on his forehead. I jumped away but crept back up to him when I saw that he didn’t even have the energy to hold his own head up.

“You got a bad bump, Mr. Blanchet,” I said.

Suddenly, someone knelt down next to me, and pushed me away.

Billy.

He must have been watching his father, keeping his distance.

He took the wet rag from my hand when I offered it to him and wiped his father’s face, as if giving him a sponge bath, working silently, scowling. He was careful when he came close to the cut, patting it gently, trying to clean out the dirt. A crude tattoo that I hadn’t noticed before scarred the fleshy part of Billy’s hand, between his thumb and first finger, a dark cross with a dot in each quarter.

Mr. Blanchet opened his eyes. When he saw Billy, he half smiled, and said, “ … shit.”

Billy ignored him and straightened his father’s clothes, making him look as neat as he could. Then he sat back on his heels
and stared at him. Wavelets plopped up on the sand in the cove, rolling pebbles around in a rush of small, familiar clicking sounds.

Mr. Blanchet passed out again, his chin resting on his chest. Billy and I both watched every unsteady breath Mr. Blanchet took as if it would be his last.

The fishing boats were coming in—Dad would be back soon. When I got up to leave, Billy glanced up at me, his eyes looking half swollen, as if he’d been awake for days. He said nothing, then turned back to his father.

Keo had started going out with Bobby Otani’s little sister, Cheryl, an eighth grader. She was as bossy as Tutu Max and I couldn’t see what he liked about her, except that she was pretty good-looking. I hardly ever saw Keo anymore. The two of them just seemed to get lost in the trees and rocks and beaches, like ghosts.

But Billy Blanchet didn’t disappear so easily.

I was fishing alone one day, near the palace, now a museum made out of the old Hawaiian royal residence. It sat in a grove of tall coconut trees in the middle of the village, a white, two-story building facing the ocean.

I’d gotten there early, hoping the fish would be feeding, casting my spinner off the rock wall that edged a small mullet pond just south of the palace. The pond was part of the museum, and the lazy mullet in its clear water were protected by law.

The narrow wall 1 stood on fell about five feet to the ocean on one side, and even farther into the mullet pond on the other. I peeked back into the pond every now and then, tempted to go after a couple of forbidden fish, fat gray creatures hanging over shadows that followed them around on the silty bottom.

Then I saw Billy.

He was crouching on the seawall that curved around the bay on the other side of the palace grounds. He was as easy to spot as a shark in shallow water. A small wave of dread rolled through my stomach.

Between casts I glanced back toward the seawall. I still stung from the way he’d shamed me in front of Keo, calling me lady-man. Although he hadn’t called me anything the time I ran into his father, I still hated him for it.

When I looked up again, Billy was gone. I scanned the entire seawall until it ended, then studied the small colors and shapes on the pier to see if he was there. He never wore anything but a white T-shirt and camouflage fatigues. And, of course, there was the bow.

I wasn’t paying attention to the spinner when it snagged in the reef. “Damn!” I said, whipping the rod back and forth, the line whistling in the air. I couldn’t free the hook. I paced back and forth pulling and snapping the rod against the snag, and was so skittish about Billy being in town that I flinched when 1 suddenly saw him at the end of the mullet pond, watching me.