Boat

by Michael Baughman

  “I’m sorry about Kanaka,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry about Kanaka now. One week after he passed we took his ashes out. Ten canoes. He wanted to be out by Castles Surf, way out there by Diamond Head. One time when they had Steamer Lane waves he rode a big one all the way from Castles to our beach at Waikiki, right there by the Moana. Kanaka’s out there at Castles right now, and he’ll always be. Kanaka’s okay. Sometimes I visit him out where he is. I take Kanaka a beer. A Primo. I got no idea where Ramsey is. You?”

  “No,” I said. “I never talked to him about dying or religion or anything.”

  “I talked to Kanaka before he passed. We took him out from the hospital. He passed right on the beach, right on Waikiki, out by Diamond Head. Remember that beach down from Diamond Head Road? We put him there on a cot so he could die where he wanted. Kanaka was on that cot two days and two nights. We stayed with him. He hurt like hell but he could eat and he could talk. We gave him medicine we got from the doctors. We gave him Primo. He couldn’t drink much Primo and he couldn’t eat much kalua pig, but we gave him what he wanted. He could eat the poi. The poi goes down easy. All his friends talked to him. The only thing he talked about was where he wanted to go. Where he is now. That’s all Kanaka wanted to talk about at the end. When he talked about it he pointed out to the ocean and he hurt like hell and he smiled. He was happy. That’s where he is forever. That’s the reason he smiled when he hurt like hell. Kanaloa takes care of Kanaka out there. Kanaloa takes care of us all wherever we go in the ocean. You believe what I’m telling you, Mike?”

  “How old were you when you started believing?”

  “I always did.”

  “Always?”

  “I always did as long back as I remember. Back to small kid time.”

  “When I was a small kid they dressed me up and put me in a church choir. I couldn’t sing so they made me what they called an acolyte. I had to help the preacher up at the altar. On warm summer days I always got sick and sometimes I keeled over. I fainted.”

  “You got some friends in Boston, Mike?”

  “A few. Not like the friends I had over there.”

  “Where’s your friend Doug? Is he in California?”

  “He plays football at UCLA. He doesn’t have a phone so I can’t call him up.”

  “Do they teach you a lot in that Boston college?”

  “No.”

  “Why you staying?”

  “I don’t think I will.”

  “What you going to do?”

  “I haven’t figured it out yet.”

  “Pretty soon they be building big hotels here on Waikiki. More tourists be coming. A hell of a lot more. You could work here on Waikiki. They got some new hotels going up already.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. “How was the Christmas party this year?”

  “Good. Always good. Chick drank some okolehao and did the crazy hula. We sang ‘Manuela Boy,’ like always. Hey, a thing jumped inside my head. How close is Boston to the ocean?”

  “Right on the ocean. The Atlantic Ocean. But it’s so goddamn cold the ocean freezes over sometimes. I didn’t see it, I didn’t go there, but they say Boston Harbor froze over a couple weeks ago. Ships couldn’t get in or out.”

  “True? For real?”

  “That’s what they say. I guess it warms up in summer. Nobody surfs though. Nobody spears fish.”

  “That place stinks. It’s pilau, bruddah. Can’t you go to a college in someplace warm?”

  “I’m thinking about it. Talking to you helps. A lot.”

  “The money got to be adding up on this telephone call.”

  “To hell with the money. Tell me what you’re going to do today.”

  “Eat breakfast. Talk to my wife and son. Head for Waikiki. Take some tourists out in the big canoes. They come here to find out what they missed in life. More come all the time because they miss more. That’s what I think. Then they go back home and keep on missing it. This afternoon me and Blue going out in my powerboat. Not to the uhu place but way out behind Populars in the reefs where the aweoweo and kumu and squirrelfish are. Blue saw Kuula in that place two years ago. He talked to Kuula. Kuula is the fisherman god. After we come in, after we clean the fish, we grab a few beers at the Waikiki Tavern. Then go home. A good day.”

  “I’ll think about you while I freeze my ass. Thanks for talking, Boat. I’ll let you go now. Don’t worry, I’ll be okay. I’ll call again sometime. Sometime pretty soon maybe.”

  “All you need, Mike, is mana. Didn’t I tell you what mana is?”

  “Power.”

  “Inside power. Spirit power. You got that, you okay. You got it?”

  “I think so. If I do it’s mostly thanks to you.”

  “I think you got it. If you got it, you find what you need someplace, sometime. I’m sorry about that old man Ramsey. One more thing jumped inside my head. When you go out surfing and you sit there waiting for waves, you watch the horizon. The horizon looks like the end but it’s not, bruddah. The ocean keeps on going way past the horizon. It could be that old man Ramsey had his own place to go. I hope he did. Aloha.”

  “I hope so too. Aloha, Boat.”

  “Aloha, bruddah.”

  Southern Yankees

  When I left Boston in June I knew I wouldn’t be coming back.

  Meanwhile, Doug had dropped out of UCLA. In a letter he explained that he hated being treated like a football slave.

  We met in Denver, Colorado, because Carol, Doug’s Punahou wahine, attended art school there. Our first paying job—and it paid relatively well—was posing in jockstraps for figure-drawing classes at her school.

  When we had what we believed to be ample money saved, we decided to hitchhike east, and then south to the Florida Keys. Despite everything I told him about the East, Doug wanted to see much more than he had seen during his months in a New Jersey prep school, beginning with New York. He said he wanted to learn what life on the mainland was really all about. After New York we would head south, all the way to the Florida Keys, and then we could make our way back to Hawaii.

  We headed out of Denver on a summer afternoon with our money and an army surplus duffel bag stuffed with clothes.

  It took four days to get to New York City. We got rides from teenage girls; from friendly truck drivers; from lonely businessmen; from belligerent fools who showed us the handguns they packed; from a rich old married couple in a shiny Cadillac; from a legless man who drove by means of an intricate system of cables with handles and pulleys, and who seldom settled for speeds under one hundred miles per hour. When we stopped at gas stations, Doug and I hoisted him up by his arms in the men’s room so he could piss.

  Just off Columbus Circle in Manhattan we found a small, dingy hotel with cheap weekly rates. Our windowless room included two lumpy single beds, a two-burner stove, a small refrigerator, and a television set. We bought Nedicks’s hot dogs for lunch, ate spaghetti in our room nearly every night, drank draft Knickerbocker beer at a nearby neighborhood bar, and watched westerns on our black-and-white TV.

  “We worked at Macy’s department store. Doug stocked shelves in the toy department and I was stationed in a huge, airless, dusty basement room. During a women’s shoe sale Macy’s had displayed thousands of left shoes in their windows and dumped the right shoes in a giant pile. My job, after the sale—with the left shoes piled on top of the rights—was to match the pairs back up.

  It took a long, miserable time, but I did it.

  During the wretched weeks that I spent matching shoes I had a single brief experience that brought me somewhere close to happiness. A fellow shoe department employee told me that he sometimes caught bonito off the Coney Island pier, so on a Saturday when Doug worked and I was free, I bought some pawnshop fishing tackle and took the subway there.

  The fall day was lovely, the sky blue and the sun warm, and several hundred fishermen were jammed together along both sides of the pier. I felt a long way from Laie Beach as I walked up
and down, stepping over cigar and cigarette butts and wads of chewing gum, searching for a vacant spot.

  Finally I squeezed in between a shriveled old man in a baggy suit and a younger, heavier fellow wearing a train conductor’s uniform.

  Even though I had no more than six inches of room on either side, my neighbors ignored me. I baited my hook with a shrimp, dropped it over the pier railing, and lowered it carefully into the water, and then, once the weight reached bottom, reeled up the slack in the line.

  Nobody was paying much attention to anybody else. For the length of the pier, we stood there shoulder to shoulder among lunch and tackle boxes, leaning on the warped railings, staring down at monofilament lines disappearing into murky water. I soon decided we all might just as well have been standing in Central Park with our lines in a duck pond or decorative fountain. Though I hadn’t expected to catch a bonito, I’d hoped for something.

  I stood in my cramped spot for at least three hours. Staring down into the water, visions of Waikiki appeared in my mind. With the time difference it would be early morning in Hawaii. Chick Daniels was setting up his beach umbrellas in front of the Royal by now. Boat and Panama might be peeling the canvas covers off the big canoes. I could see Blue and Turkey standing together down by the hau tree, talking and laughing. The beach swept its graceful curve toward Diamond Head, and the waves broke cleanly at Queens and Canoes. Beyond the waves were the reefs where we had spearfished through so many happy days, and, in my mind, as clear as color photos of my favorite Hawaiian reef fish on a page, I saw the kumu, aweoweo, uhu, hinalea, manini, moana, and the humuhumunukunukuapuaa, gliding over white sand among coral reefs and rock ledges.

  Sick of Coney Island, longing for warm water and a clean beach, I was reeling my shrimp up off the bottom, ready to catch the subway back to Manhattan. Just as I watched the bait near the surface, the silver bonito streaked across the water and hit the shrimp hard.

  What ensued wasn’t really my fault—at least, not all my fault. My little rod had no backbone, and the old reel had virtually no drag, and the line was heavy, at least twenty-pound test.

  The rod was nearly yanked out of my hands at the strike, and as the bonito ran out of line the reel made a noise like a sewing machine with a handful of sand in the gears. Within seconds a crowd had gathered around me, as all the nearby fishermen squeezed in and peered over the railing to get a look.

  The well-hooked fish went wild. Line running off my reel backlashed into a snarl of monofilament, and the line in the water tangled with the lines of at least twenty other fishermen on both sides of me.

  That brought on a roaring and obscene chorus of complaints, accusations, and curses from the crowd that had been so docile for hours.

  The scene was worthy of Laurel and Hardy or the Three Stooges. Fishermen were jostling me, yelling at each other, yanking at their rods, trying to reel as they lifted their rods over or passed them under the rods of their neighbors in futile attempts to make some sense of the huge tangles of line.

  There was so much confusion that no one knew who was doing what, or why. I was as anonymous as a pedestrian in Times Square, so I simply dropped my rod, elbowed and squirmed my way out of the crowd, and walked quickly away toward the subway station.

  And I was laughing. When I stopped and looked back from the safe distance of a hundred yards and saw the knot of people still frantically milling on the pier, I nearly had to double up—and I realized that this was the first time I’d really laughed since arriving in New York.

  It didn’t surprise me that many of the people Doug and I met who worked at menial jobs in Manhattan told us they wanted desperately to escape the city.

  Soon enough, we did what they wanted to do.

  Our first long ride heading south was with three black boys who had been discharged from the army in Massachusetts. Driving a rattletrap Ford they had bought for cash when they got out, they took us all the way to central Georgia. We split the cost of gas with them.

  Because we were eligible for the draft, Doug and I asked what the army had been like. They told us that the worst thing about it was the fact that they had been introduced to a lifestyle—a warm place to sleep, hot showers, clean clothes, and enough to eat every day—they could never hope to have again as long as they lived.

  Once we reached the South, when we stopped for meals, most often at rural diners, the boys waited outside in the car, parked well away from the places. Doug and I ate inside and brought them takeout food.

  Somewhere in South Carolina Doug struck up a conversation with the pretty young waitress who served us. Because of his accent, or lack of one, she accused him of being a “Yankee,” and he bet her that he came from farther south than she did. When he showed her his Hawaii driver’s license our meals were free.

  An old black janitor carrying a pail and mop walked through the place and out the back door as we ate, and the waitress asked Doug if there were many niggers in Hawaii. When he shook his head no she smiled brightly and told him he probably didn’t even know they were born with tails.

  “With our three new friends we drove straight through to Georgia. Somewhere near the middle of the state the boy at the wheel stopped beside a narrow dirt road that led toward their homes. As we shook hands and said our good-byes, a dark green sedan sped by.

  The old Ford bounced down the dirt road through the trees.

  Doug and I, thumbs out, stood on the shoulder of the lonely two-lane highway.

  The green sedan that had passed us going south—an old Chevrolet—came back north and slowed as it approached. As they came near I saw the windows rolling down. Four men were in the car, two in front, two in back, and all four shouted at us as they rolled slowly by, calling us, among other things, “fucking asshole nigger-lovers.”

  A few minutes later they were back. We saw them coming a quarter mile away. No other cars had been by.

  This time when they drove past they tossed firecrackers at us, strong ones, probably cherry bombs. Most of them landed near our feet, but one exploded close enough to my head to make my ears ring. Despite my ringing ears I heard their loud laughter.

  Doug gave them the finger.

  They came back again, and they stopped on the road, directly in front of us. All four men got out of all four doors simultaneously. The two on our side of the car stood where they were until their buddies came around from the far side to join them. There was nothing anywhere around us but pinewoods.

  All four were big, fat, and soft. Dressed in baggy overalls, they looked like characters out of a Li’l Abner cartoon.

  When they started for us, with mean, moronic grins on their faces, Doug and I backed up into the trees.

  The hillbillies looked at each other and smiled, apparently thinking we were trying to get away.

  As soon as they entered the woods we went for them. Doug was so quick with two punches that the first one was out cold, flat on his back, before his face could register surprise. The first punch was a left deep into the gut, followed by an uppercut that probably shattered the hillbilly’s jaw. By the time the first one hit the ground Doug was working on another, who was down and out within seconds, this time flat on his face. It took me four punches—three hard left jabs to the nose followed by a right hook—to knock mine out. By the time he was down the last hillbilly standing was running off through the trees, as fast as he could go, but it was nowhere near fast enough. Doug caught him and finished him off.

  We stole their car and drove south. Though we were fairly sure the hillbillies wouldn’t want to admit the humiliating truth to cops—that two boys had knocked the four of them out and then taken their car—we didn’t want to press our luck too far.

  After driving through three or four dismal little towns we reached the outskirts of what appeared to be something close to a city.

  We parked near an old wooden warehouse on an empty side street, tossed the keys down a sewer, walked toward the middle of town, finally found the Greyhound station, and bought ticket
s to Marathon, about halfway down the Florida Keys.

  This Dance

  We climbed off the Greyhound bus sometime after midnight and spent the rest of the windy night huddled at the base of a flimsy wooden tower at the single-runway airport on the island.

  At first light we hauled our duffel bag down the road to a small cafe that had just opened.

  The cook hadn’t arrived yet, and the waitress working the early-morning shift served us hotcakes with orange juice and coffee and refused to take our money. But she accepted my offer of coins for the jukebox, and she played the same song over and over again. The chorus of the song was, I said over and over and over again, this dance is gonna be a drag. I heard the line so often that morning that it’s played in my mind on an almost daily basis ever since.

  The waitress, a pretty girl named Sally, explained why she played the song. She was a senior in high school, and her boyfriend, a year older, had been named Robbie. A little over a year ago they’d gone to his senior prom together. The song had been big then, and they’d played it four or five times at the prom. Robbie had gone off to the University of Miami on a football scholarship. Soon he had pledged a fraternity house, and late one night after football season ended, one of Robbie’s fraternity brothers, drunk on beer, crashed his car at high speed into a concrete bridge abutment. The driver lived, and Robbie died in the crash. Sally told us she didn’t cry about it anymore. She had cried for a long time but she knew she couldn’t cry forever. She told Doug and me that we reminded her of Robbie, because we looked like football players. The night at the senior prom had been the happiest night of her life. She played the song because it took her back there.