Blue Skin of the Sea (6 page)

The crowd behind us was pretty quiet, mostly because there was a man who kept telling everyone to please be quiet. Someone yelled out to the man in the boat. “Ready, Mr. Tracy?”

The old man raised his hand without looking up. He looked tired.

“Action!” the man on the pier shouted. The two sharks came to life and moved in along the cables to the skiff. The old man saw them coming and stood up “Ay!
Galanos.
Come on,
gal-anosV
he shouted.

The sharks closed in on the huge, half-eaten marlin tied to the port side of the skiff. It was one of three fake marlins that were kept in a fenced-in area on the pier. One was a complete marlin, and almost looked real. Another looked about one-third eaten away. The third one was about three-quarters eaten away.

The old man struck down on the sharks with the oar, hitting them hard, but not too hard because there was a man inside each of them, in scuba gear. When he beat down into the water with the oar it reminded me of Dad at work in a shower of exploding froth, pulling in a two-hundred-pound tuna on his handline and whacking the life out of it with a baseball bat.

“Looks too fake,” Keo said. He almost sounded sad.

Keo was a lot like Uncle Raz, pretty relaxed about things, but at the same time concerned about details, even if they weren’t very important. Something in him just seemed to grab on and start chewing.

“A real shark,” he went on, “would come up from
under
the fish and turn over to bite it. These just bump into it like canoes.”

“Cut!” the man in charge called. The people behind us
clapped. The old man waved them off and sat back down in the skiff to fan his face again.

“We need to show him what a real shark looks like,” Keo said.

I watched the fake ones swim back out to their spot. The water was so clear I could see the bottom. It was hot and I felt like jumping in.

“Where could
we
get a shark to show him?”

“Uncle Raz could help us,” Keo said. “He knows everything there is to know about sharks.”

“Don’t you think he’s already got too much to do, now that he’s important?”

“All he has to do is show us the best place to find one.”

True, I thought. But the
Optimystic,
Uncle Raz’s boat, had been hired by the movie people to take the film crew back and forth to the barge they had anchored a couple of miles out to sea. He was making sixty-eight dollars a day, so we pretty much left him alone until after dark.

The old man stood against the attacking fake sharks eight more times before he came back in to the pier.

That night Keo stayed over at my house so we could concentrate on how to catch a shark for the old man. Uncle Harley and Uncle Raz both came over for a while.

Keo and I went out to the rocks and sat as close to the ocean as we could without getting hit by the small rolling swells that passed for waves in a calm sea. Dad’s dogs chased black crabs into the water, and once in a while came over to stand next to us, keeping their eyes out for crabs, but wanting to be a part of what we were doing too.

“We need some horse meat,” Keo said, scratching a dog’s ear.

“Not easy,” I said. “Who do we know that has horse meat?”

“I don’t know, but I bet Grampa Joe does.”

When we went back to the house, Dad, Uncle Harley, and
Uncle Raz were sitting outside on the wooden steps drinking beer. It was a peaceful sight, the three of them under the last rich stroke of orange sky slipping down off the island.

“Sixty box lunches,” Uncle Raz was saying. “I take sixty box lunches out there every day. Sheese! Somebody’s making some money at two fifty a box. And they got fifty-five hotel rooms!” Dad shook his head. It was pretty amazing all right.

“You going after a shark?” Uncle Harley asked.

“Ain’t got time,” Uncle Raz said. “Too busy.”

Keo and I perked up “What sharks?” I said.

Uncle Raz took a long swig of beer and winked at me. “Sonny’s going after ‘em,” he said, then laughed. Dad and Uncle Harley joined him. “Mr. Sturges wants sharks. Big ones. A hundred bucks if you can catch ‘em and keep ‘em alive.”

“Who’s Mr. Sturges?” Keo asked.

“The boss of the movies.”

Dad and Uncle Harley laughed again. Keo and I left. We had other things on our minds.

We decided that if we could get Grampa Joe to get us the horse meat, we’d fish for sharks down by Keahole point, where the ocean drops deep just off shore. The hundred-dollar reward, we figured, would draw attention to us, which meant we could get the old man’s attention. Then we could take him to see our shark and he’d know how to poke at the fake ones on the cables and make it look real. Keo was sure of it.

Luck was with us when we called Grampa Joe the next morning and told him our plan. Tutu Max had gone to Honolulu for the week. He was as talkative as I’d ever heard him, and happy, like someone who’d just caught a big
ahi.
“You boys give me two hours,” he said. Grampa Joe would do anything for Keo, his only grandson. And Keo was named after him, too,
which made Keo as important as King Kalakaua in Grampa Joe’s eyes.

Grampa Joe got the meat and drove it down to the pier by three o’clock. He was all right, Grampa Joe. He even whispered when he told us the horse meat was in the trunk, like he was glad to be in on our secret plan. “A half a side of horse,” he said. But actually it was more the size of a life preserver.

Dad, as usual, was out on his sampan, fishing for tuna. I swam out to his mooring and brought his skiff back in. We didn’t have much time because I’d have to get it back before six.

Grampa Joe carried the horse meat to the skiff. It was wrapped in newspaper and burlap and smelled pretty bad. “You boys aren’t the only ones fishing with horse meat today,” he said. “Augie told me they had to shoot two old plugs for shark bait. I didn’t tell him who I was getting it for. Don’t come back till you get one, eh?”

He turned and started to walk away, kind of grufflike. But that was just his way.

“Wait!” he called. “I forgot.” From the front seat of the car he pulled a white plastic five-gallon bucket with a top on it and brought it over to us. “Chum,” he said, lifting the lid. “Horse guts. Bring sharks like flies to shit.”

Keo took it into the skiff and Grampa Joe drove off. I kicked the engine over and took us out along the coast, north toward Keahoulu.

It took a half hour to get out to the point. We anchored in a small cove.

Because sharks like to feed at night we decided to rig a set line and leave it until morning. If we could hook one, our plan was to tow it back to the harbor, slowly, to keep it alive. Keo and I had spent hours gathering all the parts we needed for the trap Now all we had to do was set it.

I used an eight-inch hook made of hardened steel and
connected it to about twenty feet of quarter-inch steel cable. Keo prepared the anchor and float. He dove to the bottom and wedged the clawlike anchor into a volcanic crevice so that it could endure the tug of a hooked sharL He then ran a nylon cord from the anchor to an orange float. I attached the bait line to the float line. Keo climbed back into the skiff.

The horse meat was wet and ripening. I set the hook into it firmly, yet allowing the barb freedom to do its job.

Keo opened the plastic bucket. “Yuck!”

The swirl of swishy intestines smelled like a three-day-old toad carcass. Perfect.

“It’s really too early,” I said. “We should be dumping this after dark.”

Keo agreed, but we had no choice. We had to chum then and hope that the murky mass attracted something. Keo dropped the guts overboard in pieces, and then dumped the red liquid in after it. The water turned brown. I threw the horse meat into the middle of it. The float bobbed, sank, and reappeared.

We came back the next day just before noon. The float was gone. We circled around the cove, searching for it, saying nothing. A hooked shark could easily be tugging at the line, keeping the float beneath the surface. Or the anchor could have given way. Or the shark could have
eaten
the float.

“There!” Keo called. He pointed down into the water off the starboard bow. A tiny orange shape wobbled through the blue, far below the skiff. I shut down the engine. The quiet left behind was huge, and my ears swelled to greet it.

“Dang it … ”I said, thinking aloud. “One of us is going to have to go down for it.”

We looked at each other and laughed. It was a situation, all right. Who in his right mind wanted to jump in and see what was down there? For all we knew there was a fifteen-foot tiger
shark on the hook. And neither of us had thought to bring along a pair of fins or a face mask.

“Pull out your money,” Keo said. We solved all our dilemmas with coins. We each took three coins from our pockets and held them in our palms behind our backs. If I lost I’d have no choice. I shuffled two coins into one hand and kept one in the other. Keo reached out, fist tightly closed. I reached with the hand holding two coins.

“Six,” he said.

“Four,” I countered.

We both opened our hands and counted the coins. There were five. Keo smiled and looked me straight in the eye. We put our hands back and reshuffled the coins, each staring the other down. It wouldn’t have bothered Keo in the least to dive down and take a look around. But it bothered me plenty, and Keo knew it.

On the fourth try Keo won. He didn’t take his eyes off me, didn’t smile. I blinked, and moved to the side of the skiff.
You’re not a baby anymore.
Where did
that
come from? Another dream-memory, a mind shadow. Looking down into the water below the skiff made my stomach turn. I could almost feel the ocean gagging me.

The shrunken orange shape wobbled innocently, about twenty feet down, looking as easy to retrieve as a coin at the bottom of a swimming pool. I was a little comforted by knowing that sharks, especially tigers, got sort of nonchalant about getting themselves hooked. They had a why-fight-it attitude and just swam around with the hook in their mouth waiting for something to happen. But I also knew that their will to fight was not in the least diminished. Sharks don’t understand what it means to give up.

I hated going in without a face mask. Everything beyond a few feet was blurry. I paused just below the skiff and looked
around, all the way around. No giant moving shapes. The float wasn’t as far down as it had appeared and I reached it in a matter of seconds. I pulled on it, and it gave.

I looked all the way around again. Nothing. Don’t worry. Uncle Raz said that sharks were like dogs, lots of them around but they don’t usually attack people. But not to worry wasn’t part of me. I was as tight as an
opibi
sucked onto a rock in the surf.

Then something swept over the shapes on the ocean floor, a shifting of patterns. My stomach moved in a wave, and I felt a deep chill run through me as if I’d drifted over a freshwater spring. A huge, dark mass rose from the coral below. Even with blurred vision I could see that we’d hooked a shark, and a big one.

I felt for an instant as though I had no energy in me, like in a nightmare when something’s after you and you can’t, get away fast enough.

The shape circled out. I had to move. I
bad
to.

I let go of the float and raced upward, clawing the water, my heart pounding.

“Pull me in!”
I gasped as I broke the surface next to the skiff.

Keo grabbed my arm and the back of my shorts. I kicked and pulled, and rolled over the gunwale with visions of leaving a leg in the jaws of the shark.

“What is it?”

“We got one … shark … big shark … ”I caught my breath and started the engine. The float popped up I squeezed one hand around the throttle so Keo couldn’t see it shaking and gripped the side of the skiff with the other to hold my body still. Keo moved to the bow and lay on it with his arms outstretched and grabbed the float as we went by. I cut to neutral, still breathing hard.

“Now what?” I asked.

“We pull the anchor and take him home.”

It was a great plan—it just didn’t work. The anchor was so well wedged into the crevice that we couldn’t get it out again without diving down and removing it by hand. And neither of us was dumb enough to suggest the coins for
that
one.

“Okay,” Keo said after a minute or so of staring at me, and then into the water. “No problem. We’ll just bring the old man out here.”

I concentrated on calming my body. “How,” I asked, but really didn’t care. That I was out of the water was all that was on my mind.

“In the skiff.”

“He works all day on the barge and you think he’s going to take a ride out here?”

Keo thought for a minute. My body settled down. The float tugged at Keo’s hands and he threw it back into the water. It sank, then reappeared.

“When he hears we got a big shark on the line, he’ll come see. Why would they give a hundred bucks for a shark if they didn’t want to see it?”

We rode back to the harbor with only the drone of the outboard and the slap of the hull on the water to break the silence.

There were always so many people around the old man that we couldn’t get anywhere near him to tell him about the shark. When we asked Uncle Raz if he could think of a way for us to talk to him, he laughed. “You can see him in the movies.”

Keo said nothing to Uncle Raz about the shark so I kept quiet about it too. Now that Uncle Raz was important he didn’t have too much time to fiddle around with other things.

Keo and I went out to the end of the pier and sat down on the edge with our feet dangling over the water.

“I got an idea,” Keo said, his eyes pinned on something unseen beneath the surface of the ocean. He was in one of his thinking trances. “The shark will die if we leave him out there too long. … ”

I nodded. “Couple of days at the most.”

Keo bit at his lower lip. When he grabbed on to something he was like the old man fighting sharks away from his marlin and he wasn’t about to let up until he won, or flat out lost.

“I got it, I got it!” he yelled with a slap to his leg. “The box lunches! Uncle Raz takes the sixty box lunches out to the barge every day, right? Well, the old man gets one of those lunches.”