Island Boyz (11 page)

That woke Sammy up. He grinned. “Sure you can ride it,” he said.

Henry said, “It’s kind of . . . well, it don’t let nobody ride it but me.” The last thing he wanted was to have this haole messing up his horse. And if his father ever heard of it, he’d—

“Got him trained, huh?” Mike said.

Sammy laughed.

“What?” Mike asked. “You boys pulling my leg?”

“No no,” Henry said. “I really got a horse. It’s just . . . hard to ride, that’s all.”

“Yeah, hard to ride,” Sammy added. “We can’t even catch it.”

Henry thought, We?

“Bet he’d let me on him,” Mike said.

“How much?” Sammy asked.

“What do you mean?” Mike said.

“You said you bet. How much?”

Mike grinned. “Okay. How much you got?”

That stopped Sammy, broke as a lizard. He waved Mike off, like, Forget it already.

“Tell you what,” Mike said. “If I can’t ride the horse, I’ll give each of you five bucks. But if I
can
ride him, then you let me visit him once in a while. How’s that?”

“You got a deal,” Sammy said, sticking out his hand to shake.

“Hey,” Henry said. “It’s not your horse to bet.”

“Sure it is,” Sammy said. “I’m the trainer.”

Okay, Henry thought. Fine. What did he have to lose, anyway? If he got five bucks from Mike, the horse would be free. He shook hands with Mike. “Let’s go then.”

Mike grinned. “Now you’re talkin’.”

The horse was
way over on the far side of the field, standing in the blue shade of a mango tree. The air was still, no breeze, no cars or people around. Henry, Sammy, and Mike leaned against the rotting wood fence, batting flies away from their faces, studying the horse.

“He ain’t a purebred or anything,” Mike said. “But he don’t look bad. Nice lines, nice head. He got a name?”

“Bucky.”

“Not Bucky,” Henry said, shoving Sammy. “It don’t have a name yet. I’m still thinking about it.”

“How long you had the horse?” Mike asked.

“A week.”

Mike nodded. “Let’s go take a look.”

Mike stepped up and over the fence. Henry and Sammy followed him into the pasture, single file.

On the other side the horse stood staring at them, head up, ears cocked forward. When they got about halfway across, the horse bolted and trotted down to the lower corner.

Mike stopped and looked around. About two acres of grass and weeds. A few trees. He turned to the pond near the lower end, where the horse was now. “How deep is the water?”

Henry shrugged. “I don’t know. Five or six feet. In the middle. I don’t think it’s any deeper than that.”

Sammy said, “You got two five-buckses on you?”

Mike pulled out a small folded wad of bills, and Sammy’s eyes grew into plates. “Don’t you worry, I got it. But the thing is, I’m keeping it because me and that horse down there are going to get along just fine.”

Sammy grinned. “That’s what you think.”

Mike said, “Stay close behind me, and walk slow.”

The horse raised its head and trotted off a ways. Mike stopped and the horse stopped, looking back at them. With his eyes still on the horse, Mike reached back, saying, “Let me have that rope.”

Henry handed him the rope that was stuffed into his back pocket.

Mike let one end of it drop, then looped it back into his hand. “You boys go stand over by the fence.”

Henry and Sammy went down to the fence, walking backward. “What you going do?” Sammy asked.

“Make friends. Talk a little.”

“Talk?”
Sammy snickered, then mumbled to Henry, “You heard that? He going talk to the horse.” He half-laughed, then glanced back at Mike. “This I gotta see.”

“Me too,” Henry said. “The guy strange, yeah?”

Mike walked over to the pond. He studied it a moment, then looked up. The horse was on the other side of it now, watching him.

Sammy said, “Pretty soon he going see why we call him Bucky.”

Mike walked around the pond.

The horse headed away, not running, just keeping a certain distance, with one ear cocked back toward Mike. It snorted once and threw its head.

Mike stopped again. This time he looked to the side, not directly at the horse.

The horse stood waiting.

Mike walked away from it. Just kind of strolled off. And the horse took a few steps toward him. Amazing.

Mike stopped.

The horse stopped.

Mike walked, the horse followed.

This went on for a few minutes until the horse finally walked all the way up to Mike’s back. But Mike didn’t try to put the rope over its neck. In fact, he didn’t even turn around. He just stood with his back to the horse. When the horse was only a couple of feet away, Mike finally turned and faced it. He said something softly.

“What he’s saying?” Sammy asked.

“Who knows. Weird, man.”

“You telling me.”

Mike reached up to put his hand on the horse’s nose. And the horse didn’t throw its head like it always did when Henry got near it. Mike said something again, and reached into his pocket.

“What’s he got?” Sammy asked.

Henry didn’t answer, too interested in how Mike was taming the horse.

The horse ate whatever it was Mike had in his pocket, and Mike ran his hand along its neck. Then, slowly, he looped the rope around the horse’s nose, making a kind of rope bridle. There was a name for it, but Henry couldn’t remember what it was. Hack-something. Anyway, the horse let Mike do it, just let him.

“Look at that,” Henry whispered.

“He still ain’t riding it.”

Mike led the horse over to the pond, then let the end of the rope fall to the ground. The horse stood still.

Mike took off his shoes and socks. He took off his hat and set it on the shoes. Then his watch.

“What he going do now?” Sammy said. “Go swimming?”

“Shhh. Quiet.”

Mike unbuttoned his shirt, took it off. Then his pants and olive green undershirt. He looked back at Henry and Sammy and grinned.

“Look at that dingdong, standing there in his boxers.”

“I think you’re right. He’s going swimming.”

“Man, that guy is white.”

“Look like a squid.”

Mike led the horse into the pond, talking to it and easing it in slowly. The horse went willingly. No problem. Right in, up to its chest. Mike dipped his hand in the water and scooped up a handful, then let it fall over the horse’s back.

“He’s giving it a bath,” Sammy said.

Henry frowned. What was the guy
doing
?

Then Mike leaned against the horse. Just leaned.

A minute or two later he threw himself up over its back, so that he lay over it on his stomach, like a blanket. The horse moved but settled down quickly.

“Ahhh,” Henry whispered. “The guy is smart, very very smart. He going get on it in the water, where the horse can’t run, or throw him off, or if it does throw him off, going be an easy fall. Smart.”

When the horse was settled, Mike eased up on its back and sat, bareback. For a long moment he just sat.

Henry grinned. He liked what he was seeing. Someone could at least get on the horse, even if it was a mainland army guy. Mike was okay, you know?

Mike took up the rope bridle and nudged the horse with his heels. The horse jumped, then walked out of the pond. Mike rode around the pond. Rode up to the top of the pasture, then back.

Henry thought Mike looked pretty good on it.

Mike clucked his tongue and the horse broke into an easy run. Mike rode smooth on its back, and Henry could hardly believe that someone could ride a horse like that with no saddle and not bounce off.

“I don’t believe it,” Sammy said.

“The guy knows what he’s doing.”

“Unlike us.”

“Yeah, unlike us.”

A few minutes later Mike rode up. Stopped, sat looking down at them. “This is still a fine horse, Henry. He’s a little old, and he hasn’t been ridden in a while, but he’s been ridden in the past.”

“It wouldn’t even let me near it.”

“You just have to know how to talk to him, that’s all.”

“Stupid to talk to a horse,” Sammy said.

“No it ain’t. It’s part of gaining his trust. After that, he’ll let you ride him.”

Sammy frowned.

Henry said, “Well, I guess you won the bet.”

“You want to try riding him?”

“Nah.”

“Come on. He’s your horse.”

“It won’t let me on it.”

“Sure he will.” Mike slid off. “Come, stand here by him, let him smell you, let him look at you.”

“Uhhh . . . I don’t know,” Henry said.

The horse twisted an ear toward him.

“Go ahead,” Mike said. “Rub his nose, tell him he’s a good horse.”

Henry inched closer and rubbed the horse’s nose. It was soft, soft as feathers. The eye was big and shiny. Brown. “Nice horse,” he said, like you’d say to a dog.

“Good,” Mike said. “Here, take the rope. Walk around, let him follow you.”

Henry led the horse around the pond.

Mike and Sammy stood silently watching.

Out on the ocean two destroyers and a transport ship were heading away from Pearl Harbor. In the distance you could hear the faint cracking of rifle shot, men maneuvering in the hills. A plane droned by, silver in the clear blue sky.

When Henry got back, Mike said, “Okay, see if you can get on him. If he gets jumpy, you can take him into the water like I did. He likes the water. Come up and lean on his side, let him get used to you. Then try to get up on him.”

Henry put his arms over the horse’s back and leaned on it. The horse’s ears turned back, then forward again.

“See,” Mike said. “Now go on, get on him.”

Henry took the rope bridle, grabbed a hank of mane, and jumped up on its back. The horse took a few side steps, then settled down. Henry grinned.

“See,” Sammy said. “I told you you could ride it if you were nice to it.”

Henry rode the horse to the top of the field, then back down again. “He’s really
not
a bad horse,” he said when he got back.

“No, he sure ain’t,” Mike said.

Henry rode around the pond two times, then came back and slid off. He took the rope bridle off and set the horse free. But the horse just stood there.

Mike went down to the pond to get his clothes. He was dry now, from the sun. He got dressed, and the three of them walked back over to the road.

Mike said, “So it’s okay, then, if I come see the horse?”

“Yeah yeah,” Henry said. “Anytime. Just come see ’um, ride ’um, whatever you want.”

Mike grinned and shook hands with Henry and Sammy. “Thanks. I hope I can get up here a couple more times before I ship out.”

“Yeah, couple times,” Henry said. “Hey, what you had in your pocket, that you gave the horse?”

“Jelly beans.”

“Hah,” Henry said.

“When he does something right, reward him. Always reward good work, good behavior.”

Sammy said, “Like when you guys get a medal, yeah?”

Mike looked down and said, “Yeah, like that. Well . . .”

“Yeah,” Henry said.

Mike nodded and waited a moment, then nodded again and started down the road to the bus stop.

“He’s not a bad guy,” Sammy said. “For a haole army guy.”

“He sure knows horses.”

“Yeah.”

Henry and Sammy were silent a moment. Henry kept thinking of what Mike had said about waiting for the war. Waiting for the war. He’d never thought of it like that before, all of those guys just waiting to go fight. They’d always just been guys causing trouble around town. But that was nothing next to the trouble they were waiting for.

“He might die soon, you know, Sammy.”

Sammy shook his head. “A lot of them don’t come back.”

For the first time since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, for the first time since the three-day ship fires and massive clouds of dirty smoke and mass burials, for the first time since the arrest of his Japanese friends and neighbors, for the first time since then, Henry thought about how even now, right now, today, guys like Mike were out there somewhere dying in the war, going out on a transport ship and not coming back. Young guys, like him and Sammy. Just kids from Texas.

“I hope he makes it,” Henry said.

“Yeah.”

“But probably . . .”

In that moment, with those words, Henry paused, feeling something in his gut, like a dark thought unfolding—all those young guys were just like him, only they came from the mainland, from farms and towns and cities, coming way out here to wait for the war, to wait, to wait, to wait—then to go. And die. All of them would die, he thought.

Henry winced, then shook his head. He rubbed the back of his neck.

“You know what I going name my horse, Sammy?”

“What?”

“Mike.”

“Mike?”

“After the guy.”

“Yeah,” Sammy said. He was quiet a moment, then he said, “Because why?”

“Because that guy . . . he going ship out . . . and he ain’t coming back.”

“You don’t know that.”

“One way or the other, Sammy, he ain’t coming back.”

“What you mean?”

“I mean he going get shot and die. Or he going live through things that going make him feel like he was dead. That’s what I think, and it ain’t right, you know? It ain’t supposed to be that way.”

“Yeah, but he could be a hero.”

“Maybe. Yeah.”

“He could.”

They were both silent for a long while.

Finally Sammy looked back at the horse and said, “Mike.”

“That’s a good name . . . Mike.”

The horse took a step forward, grazing. And above the green mountains, white clouds slept.

The Doi Store Monkey

“Rossman, listen
. . . I . . . I’m sorry about the monkey, okay?”

. . .

“Rossman?”

Johnny Smythe slapped the back of his neck, once, twice. Then his arm. “I know you’re hiding in there, so come out, okay? It’s creepy out here, Rossman. And these mosquitoes are (
slap!
) eating me alive.”

Stupid mosquitoes.

“Rossman, listen. It’s past midnight, already. What do you want me to do? Beg? Okay, I’m begging you to come out of there and go back to the dorm with me.”

But nothing came from the black jungle that edged the school. No rustle of leaves, no skittering insects, not even a ghostly whisper. Nothing. The only thing on earth Smythe could hear was the mosquitoes. And the nagging voice in his head. Worm, maggot, scorpion. Heartless scumbag. Yeah, that’s you, Smythe.

Tsk.

“Could be black widows in there, Rossman. Or maybe the loloman. Yeah, what if the loloman’s in that jungle with you?”

Hmmmff. That would make him think.

Smythe shuddered and looked around for moving shadows, remembering the crazy man. He didn’t live far from here. They’d found him by accident—they being him, Riggins, Pang, and McCarty. Riggins thought the loloman was probably only about thirty years old, but he looked a hundred because his teeth were gone, at least from a distance it looked like they were.

This crazy whacko loloman, as they called him, lived in a broken-down one-room shed in the jungle. Riggins discovered him one afternoon during the second week of school when they were farting around out behind the dorm. They’d all crawled up on their hands and knees and peeked through the bushes. Smythe remembered how his hands had trembled with fear and excitement as he watched this wild-haired man standing in his doorway, scraping a fork on the door jamb to clean it. When the man went back inside, they’d all raced back to see if they could find Rossman and talk him into sneaking up and peeking into the crazy guy’s house. Rossman would do stuff like that. He’d do it because he wanted friends. Any friends.

Stupid Rossman, Smythe thought.

But anyway, they’d found him and brought him back and sent him into the clearing by the loloman’s shack with that big, fat, stupid, lopsided grin of his plastered all over his face. He’d just stumbled up and looked in the door.

Oh man, had that lolo guy gone nuts! From inside his shack he’d screamed at Rossman in some strange language none of them understood. Smythe remembered how Rossman had staggered back, looking more stunned than scared. Confused, disoriented. And that’s all Smythe had seen, because he and the rest of the guys had taken off out of there, terrified that maybe the crazy man had a gun and would come out shooting.

Rossman was mad as a hornet when he got back to the dorm, and to avoid Riggins and the rest of them, he hid out in the jungle for three hours, hid right there where Smythe was now, slapping mosquitoes.

But Rossman got over it and soon came slinking back to the dorm, where he joined in and laughed about it with everyone else, just like every other time Riggins and the rest of them faked him out or got him to do something stupid like that.

But this monkey thing . . .

“Rossman! Come out of there,” Smythe said, scowling in the dark. “This is getting old.”

Worm.

Still no sound came from the shadows.

“Rossman?”

Smythe took a step closer to the jungle, but it was thick and dense and dark and way too spooky at night to go inside, and he sure as spit wasn’t going in there to drag Rossman out. So he sat down just outside the bushes in the tall, cool grass, smooth and silvery in the moonlight. “You know what your problem is, Rossman? You try too hard, that’s what. It makes you look stupid.”

Was that it? Smythe thought. Was that really it? Or was that just an excuse? A smoke screen for a maggot? Smythe frowned and bunched up his lips.

He looked up at the moon, bright as a fresh pearl. But clouds kept passing over it, making the night blacker. Smythe picked at the long pasture grass, tearing blades out of the ground and ripping them apart. When his thoughts drifted back to the monkey, he ripped a whole hank of grass up and threw it and punched his hand. “Rossman! Come out of there!”

Jeese, Rossman drove him crazy.

Or was it guilt that did that?

“Come on, Rossman,” Smythe said, now more gently, as if he were talking to a true friend, or to some scared kid. “Just come back to the dorm. I’m sorry, okay? We’re all sorry.”

So Riggins was a worm. I guess we all were, Smythe admitted. If you thought about it. Yes. Definitely scumbags. Okay, maybe Pang wasn’t, because he tried to do the right thing by staying out of it. But the rest of us were worms for sure.

Prep school. What it does to you. Turns you into morons.

But it’s weird, Smythe thought. Ever since he’d been there, he’d had more fun than ever before in his life. All the guys. All the cussing and insulting and joking around and being cool and stealing each other’s love letters and cookie stashes and hanging out in the dorm with no parents to crab all over them. He couldn’t believe that he even liked the Saturday morning white-glove locker inspections. And flag ceremony. And even Sunday chapel, for cripes sake. Not the kind of life he was used to, but he liked it. Algebra, geography, French.

Oh, and private lessons from people like Riggins on how to be a first-rate genuine-article blue-bellied zit-faced screaming-eagle scumbag.

“Hey, Rossman. Remember when Pang opened that reeking jar of kimchi in Mr. Chapman’s class? Man, was that funny. Remember that?”

A slight rustle.

Or something. Maybe a black widow, rubbing its hands together.

Smythe mashed down the grass and made himself comfortable, looked up at the moon. Wait him out, he thought. For a while, anyway. There was a limit to this guilt. He hoped. Why don’t you guys just leave him alone, Pang had said. He’s just like that monkey, except at least the monkey can get out of his cage once in a while. Smythe remembered wondering what the spit Pang was talking about—at least the monkey could get out of his cage. What kind of mumbo jumbo was that?

The clouds moved away from the bright, glowing moon, leaving it alone in the sky. Smythe covered his eyes with the crook of his arm. Why couldn’t he just forget about the stupid monkey?

And Rossman.

Who’d showed up at school a couple of days late. Classes had already started, and everyone was pretty much settled into dorm life. Being late like that would have made it hard for anyone. That’s for sure, Smythe thought. I mean, you’d get the worst bunk and the worst locker, and you wouldn’t know anyone, and you’d have a pile of homework to catch up on, and at that school they dished up homework like saltpetered mashed potatoes.

But for Rossman being late was only a small problem.

Very small.

You see, Rossman had some kind of disease or something. Smythe didn’t know what it was, but they called him a spastic.

His body didn’t work. His mouth was lopsided and he drooled. He slurred his words when he talked, and he was hard to understand. His arms and legs went every which way when he walked. But he didn’t use a wheelchair or a cane. He just stumbled ahead on his own.

Smythe still found it hard to believe that someone had actually sent him there to live with a bunch of idiot ninth graders whose parents had kicked them out of the house because they were too busy to raise them or they didn’t like them or they wanted them to get into some hoity-toity Ivy League college and turn themselves into lawyers and doctors and investment bankers. Jeese, so funny. Could you even imagine someone like Riggins as a banker? Embezzler maybe would be more like it.

Anyway, Smythe thought, what were they thinking when they dumped this Rossman kid into the midst of us scorpions? Who did they think was going to help him? Who was going to understand him? Who was going to stop people from making fun of him? Criminy, it was like dropping a fly into a jar of toads.

At first Smythe felt embarrassed for him. He looked like a goof, and everyone laughed at him. Smythe laughed at him. Rossman even laughed at himself. That’s the kind of guy Rossman was, now that Smythe thought about it. Someone who could laugh at himself. Smythe figured it took a pretty big person to laugh at himself.

Jeese, Rossman. You should have ignored us from day one. Beat it, buttheads, you should have said, and maybe we would have left you alone.

Anyway, the school was new, only about seven years old. But the buildings they all lived in were dusty old military barracks. It was started by some bishop, but people called the students cadets, thinking it was a military school. Altogether there were about a hundred and twenty boys, all sent away to boarding school, to prep school. To another planet is what it was. At least that’s what it felt like to Smythe.

The campus—Smythe half-laughed when he thought of that place as a campus—was a square yard, maybe four or five acres, way up in the mountains on the big island of Hawaii. A row of barracks edged the yard in a
U
shape. In the middle was a chapel surrounded by a grassy lawn. An American flag flapped high on a silver flagpole, with metal halyard clips that clanged in the breeze. Tall swaying trees crowded in and leaned over everything on three sides. And then there was the thick jungle behind the trees, where Rossman was now, hiding like a rat.

Anyway, the ninth- and tenth-grade dorm, which was in a bottom corner of the U, right by the flagpole, had two open rooms, each filled with bunks and long lockers that nobody locked except McCarty, who always had cookies from home that he hoarded for himself. Ninth graders were in one room, tenth in the other. The shower and bathroom were in between. The floor was wood planked and old and dusty. Steam radiators stood in back, like exposed plumbing, under windows that looked out into the jungle.

Right next to their dorm a square, green building called the Mess Hall squatted under the towering trees, looking like an old toad. Smythe thought that was pretty cool—Mess Hall, like in the army. It was there, on the day Rossman had arrived, that Smythe had gotten his first close look at him.

Smythe remembered being called to dinner by the bell. The bunch of them filed out of their dorm and into the Mess Hall. They’d all been assigned positions at long tables, each headed by a faculty member. Smythe and all the boys in school had been told they would take turns waiting on tables and cleaning up. And they’d sit when they were told they could sit, and they’d eat when they were told they could eat. They would say grace, say please pass this and please pass that, and most important, they would learn to tip their soup bowls away from themselves and eat like civilized human beings.

Smythe had been assigned to a table in back near the kitchen, and there Rossman stood crookedly across from him, waiting along with everyone else for permission to sit. Smythe figured Rossman must have been kind of nervous coming into school late like that, a thought that now made Smythe’s guilt grow even greater as he lay under the moon remembering all this. He sure would have been nervous if it had been him.

Anyway, Rossman’s hair was blond and cut in a close buzz, and his clothes were new. Smythe remembered the way Rossman had gaped across the table at him with his lopsided mouth slightly open. Not smiling, not glaring, just looking in this tilted way, as if he were sinking on one side. Smythe had watched him a minute, then looked down at his hands, fingers laced together in front of him. Rossman looked goofy. Smythe didn’t know what to do, how to act. He peeked around at the other guys at the table and wondered if he was the only one who felt that way.

The headmaster came in and told the boys they could sit. Chairs scraped over the floor, and silverware rattled as all hundred and twenty of them settled down. Dinner began, large stainless-steel bowls of food passing silently from one hand to the next.

Smythe noticed that Rossman drooled as he ate and kept wiping his chin on the back of his wrist. No one spoke to him or even asked him to pass anything. But by the end of the first week of school, he was the great oddity of the ninth grade if not the entire school. Everyone talked about him.

“The guy walks funny.”

“Can you understand him when he talks?”

“Man, has he got B.O.”

“God, how can you even sit next to him? He drools. Sick.”

“How come he’s here, anyway? He shouldn’t be here.”

Rossman often just stood in one spot and stared at things, at people, at clouds, at spiders in sticky white webs. He held himself up by his own strange kind of balance, leaning at an unlikely angle with his arms hanging down like an ape. And at night in the dorm he snored louder than a flushing toilet.

It would have been easy to ignore him, or at least avoid him. That would have been the easy thing to do. He was different. He wasn’t at all like everyone else. We could’ve just left him alone, Smythe thought. And maybe we would have.

Except that Rossman wouldn’t allow it.

Because, they soon discovered, Rossman had a personality. He was a person. There was a boy inside that crooked body. A boy who wanted to be just like everyone else. He wanted to make friends, he wanted to talk to you, and if you listened and tried to understand him, you could even have a conversation with him. It took some work, but it could be done. The thing with Rossman was that he tried harder than anyone in school to get to know the other guys.

A wispy cloud crossed over the moon, and Smythe humphed, thinking that Rossman tried too hard, actually. Anyway, how do you really get to know somebody you can barely understand?

Smythe worked hard at trying to convince himself they had tried. They’d let him listen to their jokes, hadn’t they? And Rossman laughed at them just like they did. And they’d let him hang around, right? Wasn’t that trying?

Right.

Smythe tore up another hank of grass and tossed it, remembering back to that Saturday afternoon after their first full week of school. He and Riggins and a bunch of guys were standing around talking and joking and spitting off the porch at certain targets, like spiders in webs or leaves, or long-distance targets out in the quad. After a while Rossman came out of the dorm and lurched over to see what they were up to. They stopped spitting, a little uncertain if they should go on, since . . . well, since Rossman drooled and spat all the time . . . because he couldn’t help it. So anyway, they all decided in some unspoken way that they’d continue spitting. So what if it made Rossman feel bad.