Boat

by Michael Baughman

  Boat heard him out, then handed his ukulele to Turkey and stood. With his customary smile, he looked down at the tourist. “We’re having our own fun, mister,” he said. “Leave us alone here on our beach. No hard feelings. We having fun is all. You run along now.”

  The tourist, whose pink face had darkened to red, pointed at Boat, almost touching his chest with an index finger. He called Boat a sinner who was disgracing the Christian God and everything He stood for.

  Boat reached out with one big hand, grasped the top of the tourist’s head, and lifted him off the ground, as easily as a player with a big hand can palm and lift a basketball.

  “Mister, I could crush your head like an egg,” Boat said. “Maybe I will.”

  The tourist’s feet were a foot off the sand, and his skinny, knobby-kneed legs began to tremble. The pink face that had darkened to red with rage turned suddenly pale with dread.

  Nobody said a word or made a sound. It was late afternoon, and Boat had downed plenty of Primo by then. His bright eyes narrowed, his face tightened with anger, and I thought he might do it.

  But he smiled again and simply dropped the haole tourist, who collapsed in a trembling heap.

  “You run along now,” Boat said. “Move your scrawny ass.”

  The tourist lay there on his side for several seconds that seemed longer. When he finally gathered himself he pushed to his feet and sprinted, really sprinted, across the parking lot to a side door into the Moana.

  After he had disappeared into the hotel Boat and the beachboys laughed long and loud before launching into another verse of “Manuela Boy.”

  The other time I saw Boat angry had nothing to do with Primo beer but did involve music.

  One quiet morning I was sitting on the bench under the hau tree with Boat, Rabbit, and Blue. We were watching the waves break at Queens and Canoes and talking about the surf.

  Five tourist boys arrived from Kalakaua Avenue, haole teenagers, and they spread towels on the beach not far away and turned on a portable radio, loudly.

  “Hey, Mike,” Boat said after a minute or two. “Ask those boys to please make that radio more quiet. It’s peaceful here this morning. And ask nice, bruddah.”

  So I walked over and told the boys, nicely, that my friends would appreciate them turning their radio down. They looked at me, and then at the beachboys, and then they looked at each other and laughed.

  I walked back and sat down.

  When the boys turned the radio up instead of down, Boat stood up. He walked over, picked the radio up by its handle, and carried it down to the water. With the form of a discus thrower, he tossed it forty or fifty yards out to sea. When the radio hit the water the music stopped. Boat was already halfway back to the bench by then. He looked at the boys, but they didn’t look at him.

  By the time Boat sat down the five boys were hurrying down the beach toward the Royal.

  Often after a day at the beach I walked all the way home from the Outrigger Club. The route took me down Kalakaua Avenue, up across the Ala Wai Canal on the McCully Street bridge, then across Beretania and King Streets to Pawaa Junction, where I always bought a plain rice sushi at the stand across from the movie theater, and finally up the long hill past Punahou School into Manoa Valley.

  On the day of the beachboy Noons’s funeral, Boat asked me to stop by the celebration on my way home. “We be on the field right there beside the canal,” he said, “eating beef stew, drinking the Primo, playing the music, talking story about Noons.”

  I’d watched from the club restaurant when the beachboys paddled out in the morning in several eight-man canoes to scatter Noons’s ashes. The distant outriggers formed a loose circle on calm water well beyond Canoes, about where the first-break waves broke in June.

  After half an hour the canoes came back, the men paddling faster on the return trip, and, when they reached the beach, everyone looked happy.

  It was past five o’clock when I turned right at the McCully bridge to walk along the canal to the celebration. A sizable crowd was there, fifty or sixty people, comprised of the beachboys with their wives, children, and extended families. I heard the music as I approached, and I saw the big iron stewpot beside a picnic table, and the usual tubs of iced Primo.

  But I didn’t see Boat. Walking through the crowd I spotted Turkey, and when I asked where Boat was he smiled and pointed.

  I looked and saw him at the far end of the field, emerging from between two parallel strips of white canvas that had been set up to provide an adequately private place to urinate. When I waved he saw me and came over.

  “Hey, bruddah!” he said with a smile. “Have a Primo! Drink one for Noons!”

  I drank three Primos for Noons—Boat kept passing them to me—and what I saw and heard in the time I was there helped change my life.

  I sat on the grass in warm shade near one of the beer tubs, the happy music at a distance, my back against a palm tree, while I watched and listened. The beachboys talked about where they wanted their ashes scattered when their time came.

  One said he wanted to be almost where they had left Noons, but just a little closer to shore, because that way Noons might ride bigger waves, but he would get more.

  Another beachboy said he wanted to be at Queens because he liked the fast right slide there.

  A third wanted Populars, because Queens and Canoes would be too crowded for him.

  Yet another said he wanted his ashes far out at Steamer Lane in blue water, with big fish in the deep reefs on the bottom.

  Boat came back from the beer tub with two open bottles and handed one to me. “Noons loved his Primo!” he shouted, holding his own bottle high, as if making a toast.

  The nearby beachboys laughed and cheered and toasted back.

  There was lots of talk like that, and laughter, happy men concentrating on where they would go to live after they died. They believed what they were saying, and their contentment in it made me happy too, and I couldn’t help contrasting what I saw and heard there by the Ala Wai to the only other funeral I had ever attended. My grandfather on my father’s side had died a few months before we left Pennsylvania, and his corpse was displayed in a funeral parlor. He lay in a shiny coffin, head on a frilled white pillow, face waxen, cheeks rouged grotesquely red, and dressed in a dark suit he’d never worn, and never would have worn, in his life.

  While I sat drinking my three beers, the beachboys took turns approaching Noons’s widow, a white-haired Hawaiian woman in a red muumuu who sat in a folding chair next to the stewpot. Each beachboy spoke to her at some length, then handed her an envelope containing cash. She smiled and thanked them, one by one.

  Watching Noons’s widow, it occurred to me that the beachboys had families and lives away from the ocean. I knew Boat had a wife and son, but I’d never met them, and that was fine with me. The beach was its own self-contained world, and we could know people there, even love them, without having—or wanting to have—any idea about the rest of their lives.

  I learned the next day that, after I’d left to walk home, Boat had taken two bottles of Primo back to Waikiki, and then paddled on his surfboard with them out to where Noons’s ashes had been scattered. He dove to the bottom and left a Primo there for Noons, and drank the second bottle sitting on his board while he talked to Noons, and then he paddled back.

  Shark

  During a summer of unusually flat surf, my friend Doug and I spent a lot of our time spearing fish together out at the sunken barge. We were growing, putting on muscle after puberty, and, like most boys, wanted to be men.

  We always started our spearing trips early, warming as we paddled, the bow of the two-man canoe slapping gently down against the water as we slid over small Baby Surf swells.

  Some days we stayed out four or five hours, spearing the entire time, returning to the canoe only to dump more fish into it.

  I was more accurate with a spear than Doug, but he was a much stronger diver and had more breath. Doug was especially effective when it ca
me to exploring the deep recesses of the sunken barge. In the twisted remains, the metal grown over with coral and weed, there were places where he would swim out of sight. After twenty or thirty seconds, he would either emerge with a good fish on his spear or cursing underwater at his miss, bubbles rising just ahead of him to the surface.

  We gave everything we speared to Chick Daniels, and, in return, he told us when new tourist wahines arrived at the Royal.

  Then on a morning in August we saw a shark. Both Doug and I had carried some fish to the canoe and were swimming back toward the barge for more when it showed about fifty feet away, perhaps three feet beneath the surface on the seaward side of the barge, swimming slowly, straight at us.

  Apparently the shark saw us just as we saw it, because as we stopped swimming, it did too.

  In an instant, both Doug and I panicked and caught ourselves and pretended we hadn’t. Swimming hard back to the canoe would have been a perfectly normal reaction, but as we stopped and began to turn in that direction we were enough aware of each other to check ourselves, and then to pretend that neither of us had been frightened.

  After hanging motionless for several seconds the shark turned slowly away and swam straight out to sea.

  We watched until it disappeared and then continued on toward the barge to spear, pretending nothing special had happened.

  I told Boat about the shark that afternoon.

  “Were you scared?” he asked me with a smile.

  “At first. A little. More than a little. Pretty much.”

  “Nothing to be scared of, bruddah. Sharks don’t bother people unless there’s plenty blood. I saw a shark out by Pearl Harbor once when I was your age. Big buggah. Too big to spear. When we caught that shark we used a big fat pig for bait. The only thing to be scared of is a moray.”

  After that first time, Doug and I saw the shark nearly every day we speared. Our theory was that the barge had become a regular stop on its feeding circuit. Each day the same thing happened: a few feet beneath the surface, the shark would appear near the limit of our underwater vision, hazy prisms of light reflecting off its smooth, bluish back. And each time it saw us it would stop momentarily, then turn and swim slowly away.

  Once, paddling in, we talked about the possibility of chasing the shark, or luring it toward us. We thought that the blood of several fish might bring it close. We decided that, if we ever did get close enough, the best place to put a spear would be just behind an eye.

  But we never tried the blood in the water idea, or mentioned it again, probably because we feared it might work.

  The shark came at us a few days before football practice was scheduled to start on September first. Doug had just speared a kumu in a deep ledge close to the barge, and he had brought it up to the surface and was swimming toward me to show it off.

  Once again, we saw the shark at the same moment. As usual, it stopped some fifty or sixty feet away, turned at a slight angle to us, then held there, blue-backed and white-bellied in filtered light.

  Doug and I stayed where we were, expecting that after a brief pause the shark would turn away and swim to sea, as it always had before.

  This time the seconds dragged on, and then the shark swam straight at us.

  The next thing I knew I was swimming. I had dropped my spear and sling and, in a heart-pounding, sick-stomached dizzying panic, I was churning through the water, desperate to reach the canoe.

  Doug and I reached the canoe together—the side away from the outrigger faced us—and we nearly turned it over as we clambered in. The tension of the anchor rope on the opposite side of the boat probably saved us that indignity. If we had capsized, I’m certain we would have done our best to swim at that same furious pace all the way back to shore.

  Gasping for breath, we sat facing each other. I took my diving mask off and looked across the surface for the shark, but there was no sign of it. My hands were shaking hard, and when I finally glanced at Doug I saw that he too had dropped his spear and sling out there somewhere, and his face had gone pale through his dark tan.

  Though the shark was almost surely long gone by then, we didn’t look for our spears and slings.

  After a few minutes’ rest I hauled the anchor up and we paddled for shore, thankful for something to do, glad to leave the barge behind us.

  Halfway in, the catamaran Manu Kai sailed past us, heading to sea. The smiling tourists sitting under the red and orange sails waved at us. We didn’t wave back.

  When I told Boat about what had happened he looked at me and then tilted back his head and laughed. “The good thing is, you told me about it,” he said. “Everybody says sharks are bad. Everybody says plenty things. You can’t believe everybody, bruddah.”

  I was helping Boat put the canvas covers on the tourist canoes on the beach in front of the club. The Manu Kai was moored a few yards offshore. Down the beach in front of the Royal I saw Chick taking in his beach chairs and umbrellas. Behind Chick a few tourists were sitting at outdoor tables with drinks.

  The tide was low and the surf was down again, and Papa San, the old Japanese man who did laundry for the club, was collecting bits and strands of limu from the hard sand near the waterline, dragging a burlap sack behind him.

  “You know why Papa San goes after the limu every chance he gets?” Boat asked me.

  I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head. I assumed that he was changing the subject out of kindness.

  “He saves up a little more money that way. When he eats the limu he can save on food. He’s saving up fast as he can so he can get sent back to Japan when he passes.”

  “After he dies?”

  “Yes. You understand why he wants that?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “Everybody got to go where he belongs. The lucky people stay where they belong. The not-so-lucky people got to go back sooner or later. Even if they die they got to go back. That’s why Papa San’s out there with his sack. Tell me—how big was that shark?”

  I thought about exaggerating but decided not to. “Six or seven feet,” I said.

  “When you dive, when you see through a mask, everything looks bigger. Maybe it was five feet. You know what shark is in Hawaiian?”

  “No.”

  “Mano is what it is. Mano is the word. Sharks were gods to the old Hawaiians. To me they still are gods. Old Hawaiians used sharks for food, for tools. They used the skins for drums. They used the teeth for war clubs and knives. Sometimes sharks told the future. It could be that shark today wanted to tell you something. Maybe something about your future. Old Hawaiians fed the sharks. Sometimes they petted the sharks like we pet dogs today. After they died Hawaiian people came back as sharks. Sometimes they did. Those sharks protected their relatives. Maybe that shark you saw was your friend. The shark is a strong Hawaiian god. You believe what I’m saying?”

  I didn’t believe it yet, but I lied. “Yes,” I said.

  What I did believe was that the day of the shark bothered Doug more than it did me. I never went spearing with Doug again.

  Sons of Beaches

  I had conflicts with my parents.

  After we’d lived in Hawaii for four or five years, it struck me as not merely odd, but clearly wrong, that neither of them had ever been in the ocean or anywhere near a beach.

  My father belonged to the Oahu Country Club in Nuuanu Valley, where I sometimes caddied for him on Saturday mornings. He and his golfing partners began drinking early at the bars, stationed on several tees around the course, and after their eighteen holes they sat in the clubhouse and drank more while they played cribbage, talked about money, and told tasteless jokes. A gag about how the two most overrated things on earth were home cooking and home screwing always provoked loud and appreciative laughter. But what bothered me most about the country club was that the membership was restricted: nobody but whites allowed, except as hired help. Whenever I brought the subject up my father reacted angrily, arguing that a private club had every right to let in people or ke
ep them out as they saw fit.

  A disagreement I often had with my mother was over the trivial subject of clothes. In those days most of the boys attending Punahou wore light blue denim slacks. I happened to own two green aloha shirts that I liked, but every time I put one on in the morning my mother told me I looked awful, because blue and green didn’t go together. When I asked her if the blue sky and the green earth went together she said no.

  I had conflicts with teachers at Punahou. One day in my social studies class Dr. Shorter lectured us about the general nature of economics. Many Punahou students came from locally prominent and wealthy families, and several Punahou teachers, Dr. Shorter among them, taught conservative values whenever they could.

  Dr. Shorter was a short, stocky man with hair the color of dry ice combed straight back over his flat head. He seldom smiled, and when he did he looked sly, devious, something like Richard Nixon. Shorter customarily paced back and forth on his bowed legs in front of the class, leaning forward at the waist, hands clasped behind his back as he spoke.

  One day he told us, angrily, that communism was a sickness, socialism a disease. He explained that wealth couldn’t be arbitrarily divided or artificially shared. He claimed that if all the money was taken from the richest people in America and divided equally among the population, within a few short years most of the formerly rich people would end up with most of the money all over again, because cream always rises to the top.

  I blurted out my own imperfect analogy: that, in a toilet bowl, feces often rose to the top too.

  Several boys sitting in front of me laughed and a few girls blushed and giggled.

  Dr. Shorter’s blue eyes narrowed with rage. At a quickened pace, he strode back and forth across the room in front of the class three or four more times before he changed the subject.