Blue Skin of the Sea (3 page)

With both hands I squeezed Dad’s arm to get him to take us up, but froze when I saw just beyond him a foot-long, green fish, motionless, watching me with one round eye. A harmless stickfish, as close as I’d ever seen one. I kicked and grabbed at Dad, and the fish vanished, shooting off into the distance as suddenly as it had appeared.

On our way back to the pier Dad let me rest my hand on the throttle and pilot the skiff through the harbor. I was so tired that everything around me seemed dreamlike. The long red roof of Kona Inn stretched sharp and comforting within the thick, green grove of palms that lined the shore, just above a sketch of white foam.

Dad sat next to me in the stern on the other side of the engine, his arms lean and muscular, his chest hairless and a deep red-brown.

I studied the coral heads as we passed over them. It wasn’t so bad, I thought. I could do it again.

I could, if I wanted to.

But I could almost feel the solid, hot concrete of the pier under my bare feet.

Dad looked long at his sampan as we eased by. Three white letters sailed across its blue transom.
Ipo.
Sweetheart. The name Dad had given my mother.

With Dad’s help I made a long, slow turn around the boat, close enough to see salt dried on its hull. It rode at its mooring as easily as an old coconut floating in a tidal pool. Dad faced away from me, looking at the thirty-foot sampan he spent his life on. I peeked around him trying to see if I could see what Dad saw.

Keo was alone in the cove, floating on one of the tubes. Small waves from the skiff rocked him as we passed by. Dad let me out near shore and headed back over to the small boat landing.

Keo rolled off the tube and swam out into the cove, out to the deepest point. “Come on out,” he yelled.

I stared back at him, my arms hanging at my sides like old frayed rope.

“Chicken,” he shouted.
“Buk-buk-buk-bu-gockl”

The ocean rose to my knees, my waist, then my chest, as I slowly waded in. When it reached my chin I started swimming, madly kicking and clawing at the ocean. Water exploded all around me, splashing clumsily over my face and blurring my vision. I aimed my chin to the sky and thrashed out to Keo, swimming past him, circling him, then heading back to the beach. I caught a glimpse of Dad watching from the pier.

Keo pawed at the water when he swam, too, but easily, without splashing. “Let’s dive to the bottom,” he said.

I didn’t answer. I barely made it back to shore.

A half hour later, Dad came down and sat next to me on the sand. Keo was out in the water, hanging over the edge of one of the inner tubes, motionless, as if asleep

“You did a good job out there today, Sonny,” Dad said, pointing out to the harbor with his chin. Then, after a moment of silence, he added, “I’m proud of you.”

Keo looked up and saw us, and started kicking in to shore.

Dad stood, as if shaken out of a daydream. “It’s time for a couple of changes,” he said. “Tell Keo to come, we’re going for aride.”

Dad walked over to his Jeep while Keo came up from the water, holding the dripping black tube over his shoulder.

Dad drove up the rocky driveway to our house, dust rising behind the Jeep and spreading into the dry trees. Aunty Pearl strolled out onto the porch with her black hair pulled behind her head and curled into a tight knot. She waved down to us as we bounced into the yard, her small hand almost lost on an arm as thick as my stomach. She looked exactly like the old pictures of Hawaiian queens, wide and tall, draped in full-length muumuus, with huge bare feet as tough as coconut husks. If an orchid was beautiful, then Aunty Pearl was a thousand of them put together.

Keo’s scruffy dogs, Bullet and Blossom, set off a racket of barking. Aunty Pearl shushed them by clapping her hands.

Off to the right and slightly downhill Uncle Harley’s icehouse stood like a huge, windowless box, almost half the size of the main house. He made ice for boats in there, and kept fish before trucking them over to the market on the other side of the island. A small, fenced-in pigpen with shady, corrugated iron
shelters flowed off the uphill side, big enough for three or four good-sized pigs.

The dogs leaped at us as we drove up to the house. Keo jumped out of the Jeep. “Gome on,” he said. “Let’s go see the pigs.”

I started running after him.

“Sonny, wait,” Dad called. “Come up to the house for a minute.” Keo kept on going without turning back.

Aunty Pearl gave us both a hug. It had only been a few hours since I’d seen her, but still she crushed me to her as if I’d been gone a month. She frowned at Dad. “So what are you doing up here in the middle of a perfectly good fishing day?”

Dad looked down at me and rubbed his hand over my head, then put his arm on my shoulder. “I think I can handle it now, Pearl.”

Aunty Pearl put her hand to her cheek, then hugged us again, and started crying. She couldn’t talk for a few minutes, because she would start crying every time she tried. Finally, she motioned us into the house.

Keo started walking back toward us kicking an old can.

Dad and I followed Aunty Pearl to the room that Keo and I shared. I thought I knew what Dad was saying, but I didn’t want to think about it in case it wasn’t true. Then he and Aunty Pearl started taking my clothes out of the dresser.

Keo burst into the room. “Hey, what’s going on?”

Aunty Pearl put her arm around him and pulled him up close. “Sonny’s going home, Keo—to live down by the beach with his father.” Then she turned to me. “But you’ll be back for lots of visits, won’t you, Sonny?”

I nodded, but must have looked as if I weren’t sure, because Aunty Pearl pulled Keo in closer, and started crying again.

Dad’s old wooden house stood up on stilts, with three or four feet between the floor and the ground. “To keep rats and mongooses out,” he’d told me.

Kiawe and coconut trees surrounded the long, rectangular yard and swooped up behind us to the road that ran along the coast from Kailua to Keauhou. Dad parked the Jeep on the grass, his five dogs whining and wagging their tails as we pulled up to the house.

“You can have my room,” Dad said as we walked in. It was the only bedroom. Dad nodded toward the big couch in the front room, the place I always slept when I came to stay for a day or two. “I like to sleep out here, anyway,” he said.

Except for the few things I’d brought with me, nothing in the place was mine. But there was nothing I owned, or could think of owning, that I wouldn’t have given up to be right there with Dad. Now, and forever, only one thin wall would stand between his bed and mine.

“Before we unpack your things,” Dad said, dropping the cardboard box of clothes on the kitchen table, “let’s go down to the ocean, maybe take a quick swim. It’s hotter than a dump fire around here.” I’d had enough swimming that day, but I didn’t mind.

I followed him down the porch stairs and out across the grass to the water. You could look out and see the horizon, miles and miles away, with only the clean, blue and turquoise expanse of ocean between the yard and the end of the world. Dad’s dogs followed, then trotted out ahead, sniffing everything in sight as if they’d never been there before.

The shoreline was mostly lava, with a few good-sized sandy patches nestled around small tidal pools. Dad and I picked our way out over the rocks to the water, which sparkled under the late afternoon sky. Small waves hissed in and surrounded us as we eased into the ocean, Dad leading the way, and me trailing behind, turning the water white as I churned through it.

I suddenly realized that I was
swimming
—out over my
head, in deep water. I tried to keep up with Dad, but got tired and had to go back to shore.

The powdery sand patches were hot and comforting. I sat down in one and stared back out at Dad, now making long, quiet dives to the bottom. Sudden sleep tugged at my eyes, and I fell back on one elbow, then lay down completely, the low sun quickly turning the water on my face to fine salt crystals. Warmth curled around my shoulders from the sand stuck to my back and arms.

The last thing I remembered before Dad woke me was thinking of the earth as a woman. Someone like Aunty Pearl, surrounding me with strong arms, and rocking me to sleep with soft humming.

“Don’t run out of gas yet, Sonny,” Dad said. “We still have a big
mabimabi
to eat. I think you can handle half of it—at least from what I can tell by what IVe seen today.” He was bent over me, water streaming off his deep-tanned shoulders. He pulled me up and brushed some of the sand off my back.

When Dad started back up to the house, the dogs spread out ahead, sweeping over the rocks.

Stepping where Dad stepped, I followed him home.

Uncle Raz stood at the edge of Uncle Harley’s pigpen with his arms draped over the fence. The sun looked white in the humid air, and the island was as still as the inside of a car with the windows up “I bet Pearl weighs more than the pig,” Uncle Raz said.

Dad, Keo, and I glanced over at Uncle Harley, standing there next to Uncle Raz, staring down at the pig as if he hadn’t heard. We waited, almost without breathing. He’d never let Uncle Raz get away with a remark like that.

Uncle Raz puckered up his face. “That damn thing smells worse than a pile of rotten fish, Harley. I don’t know how you can keep it around your house.”

Dad and I had driven up to help Uncle Harley figure out what to do about slaughtering the pig. Keo was nine, and I was eight, and, like Uncle Harley, we’d grown to love old Alii, like we loved the dogs, even though we knew long ago that the day would come when the pig would be butchered.

Uncle Harley snapped his fingers twice. “Alii, come here, boy.”

The pig came lumbering over and Uncle Harley reached down and scratched him behind his ears. Looking at the hairy, blunt, mud-caked nose, and small half-open eyes, anyone could see how easy it would be to get attached to him. He was a Hawaiian pig, a boar with his tusks cut off, and had long, black, bristly hair that felt like nylon fishing leader. He looked pretty mean, and if you didn’t know him you wouldn’t get anywhere near the fence. But Uncle Harley had captured him young and he was as calm and as tame as old Blossom.

“Must weigh a ton,” Uncle Raz said. “Probably have to clean it right here in the pigpen.”

Uncle Harley kept his hand on Alii’s head. “Probably about three-sixty, three-seventy is all. What do you think, Raymond?”

“Big enough,” Dad said. “It’s going to take all three of us to carry the bugger after we shoot him.”

No one spoke for a few minutes after that. It was the pig’s last day.

Uncle Raz, as usual, broke the silence and moved our thoughts into easier territory. “So what, Harley, you want to put twenty bucks on who weighs more? The pig, or Pearl?”

“Sheese!” Dad stepped away and shook his head.

“No, really,” Uncle Raz said. “How much does Pearl weigh?”

Was he
serious?

Uncle Harley just stared down at the pig. Then he pushed himself back from the fence and said, “I’ve never asked her how much she weighs. Maybe she doesn’t even know herself.”

“Well, I think Pearl weighs more,” Uncle Raz said.

“No, the pig weighs more.”

“Twenty bucks,” Uncle Raz said.

Uncle Harley smiled at him. It could have been me and Keo
smiling like that, after me telling Keo there was no way he could ride Alii for more than five seconds. If there was anything that kept our family together it was a challenge.

Uncle Harley put his arm on Keo’s shoulder and pulled him up against his side. “Okay, hotshot,” he said to Uncle Raz. “Put a hundred down and you got a bet.”

Dad snickered. That would shut Uncle Raz up pretty quick. Keo shifted his eyes in my direction. We’d never heard Uncle Harley go over thirty dollars before. A hundred sounded like betting a Jeep or a boat.

Uncle Raz’s eyes darted around like he was adding it up. He stuck out his hand. “Easy money, sucker.”

Their knuckles turned white when they shook.

“If Maxine finds out about this, you’d both be better off as shark bait,” Dad said. “She’ll probably smell this one a mile away.” He was referring to Aunty Pearl’s mother, Tutu Max. “And there’s another problem,” Dad went on. “Easy to weigh the pig, but what about Pearl?”