Boat

by Michael Baughman

  The pension served excellent food, especially the four-course dinners. There was no motor traffic on Capri, and we walked the narrow lanes after dark and soon found a small place that served delicious red wine and featured an excellent guitar player.

  Back in our room we made love in the cooling night with the windows open. In the mornings we made love and then walked down the steep path to the beach with our towels and diving masks.

  After our fourth day on Capri we decided to marry the following May.

  I mailed an invitation addressed to:

  Boat

  Waikiki

  Hawaii

  The Berlin Wall went up in August.

  I was shooting eight-ball with a teammate in the company day room when Sergeant Rayes stormed in. Speaking almost too fast to be understood, Rayes told us the fucking commies were acting up in the fucking east zone. He thought the commies might cross to our side of the line, and ordered us to check out our M-1s, and he promised that, as soon as he got the authorization, we’d all be issued live ammunition.

  All of us on the basketball team ended up sitting on our bunks with our M-ls and the promised ammunition.

  My bunk was between a bigot named Wills from Philadelphia and a black boy named White from St. Louis.

  I knew Wills was frightened. He wouldn’t stop talking about how he wanted a chance to kill some fucking commies.

  “White and I kept quiet. We both knew that Wills couldn’t have explained the basic differences between an East German communist and a Republican in Pennsylvania. I’d already decided I’d fight in the unlikely event we were attacked. I had a right to defend myself. But if orders came to attack East Germany I’d refuse. If I did that I had no idea what might happen to me.

  Two nights later we were back to playing basketball. And I was back spending nights with Hildi in our apartment.

  “Boat here. Who you?”

  “Mike.”

  “Congratulations, bruddah! You a married man!”

  “You got my invitation.”

  “You don’t sound so far away. Where are you?”

  “Still in Germany. I guess the phone’s working better today.”

  “Good to hear your voice, bruddah! Good to hear it loud and clear!”

  “You were right about where to go. We went south to Italy together, an island called Capri. It worked. I thought maybe you’d show up for the wedding.”

  “What you think those German people would do when a three-hundred-pound Hawaiian showed up? What you think they say?”

  “You up to three hundred now?”

  “No worry, it’s not fat, bruddah. I’m paddling more now. Paddling strong. We got the big races coming up. Getting ready. Got to beat the Waikiki Surf Club like always. You sound happy, bruddah. Every sentence you say sounds happy. Every word.”

  “I really wish you could’ve come, Boat.”

  “Tell me about the ocean in Italy.”

  “Maybe it’s not Hawaii but it’s beautiful. We swam every day, hours every day, in warm clear water with our face masks. We gave the masks to some little Italian kids on the dock the day we left. We went to Rome on the way back to Germany and saw that coliseum where the lions ate the Christians.”

  “I know about the Romans. People were people way back in old times too.”

  “I got Hilde to say she’d marry me on the beach on Capri. We got married back in her hometown, where I’m stationed. We got married twice.”

  “You got to get married twice in Germany?”

  “Once in the town hall and then the next day in church. The church was a thousand years old.”

  “My church is the beach, the ocean. That’s where my gods are. Way older than that.”

  “Tell me how the old-time Hawaiians got married.”

  “I tell you. I tell you because plenty people got some wrong ideas about it. Hoao paa is the words for marriage. A kane and wahine wanted to get married. The parents talked it over first. Then the parents taught the young ones about working, living together, getting along. After the young ones embraced—honi is the word—they were married. Didn’t matter where they did it. A man never left his wife and a woman never left her husband. That’s the truth about how it was in old times.

  “Then one time a selfish chief took himself three wives. Pretty soon his wife got her revenge. Pretty soon she had eight husbands. After that it went back to the old way, the right way. The life was all about ohana. Ohana is everybody related to you and everybody you loved. Everybody raised the children. Grandparents, relatives, friends. Everybody loved the children. Everybody lived off the ocean. It was different from the haole way. The children had their freedom and they had their honor. Everybody respected the children. Everybody respected the old people. Everybody loved the ocean. You, Mike, you part of my ohana. You call wahines frauleins over there. I remember that. Tell me again, what’s your fraulein’s name?”

  “Hilde.”

  “Hilde’s in my ohana now.”

  “Mahalo, Boat.”

  “Don’t you forget what I say.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  “Tell me where you live now.”

  “We rent the top floor of a little old house. A widow lives down below. We can see a grain field out the window, and across the field we see the woods. We walk through the woods a lot. People walk a lot here.”

  “You still playing the basketball?”

  “Still playing. Before long they’ll be sending me back. Everybody over here got excited when they built that wall in Berlin, in East Germany, but now things are back close to normal. I’m not sure what I’ll do when I come back. I mean, what I’ll do after I get out of the army.”

  “I can’t tell anybody what to do. Maybe I can say what kind of thing to do.”

  “That’s partly why I called, Boat. Mostly why. To hear your ideas.”

  “Only you can tell you what to do. Nobody else. I’m a Hawaiian who works on the beach. I never had a lot of school. But I think I know some things. One thing I know is you can’t get trapped in the wrong ways. I see people do it all the time. But you can’t get trapped by the bad ideas plenty people have. You got your own ohana now, the start of one, so you got to take care of your ohana. Got to work, find a good way to live, find a place to live in. Before you find those things you got to know what you want. Not what other people think you should want, what you want.

  “Me, I want the ocean, the waves, the fish, the iwas flying high. I want my friends. I want my ohana and I got it. The old Hawaiian ways are finished. Pau. But I can keep the parts I love, and I do. I got them every day. I got enough money. You got to have enough for what you need. That’s how it is in the world now. You young, Mike. Think about it. Figure it out. Figure out the best thing you can do and do it. Nobody can tell you what that is. Not me or anybody else can tell you. Where you going to go when the army lets you out?”

  “I get discharged in California, where I came in.”

  “Can you come back to Hawaii?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Waikiki is all different. More big hotels. More people on Waikiki hustling for all the money they can get. Everybody smells the money and wants it. All I want is enough and I got it. Some people been trying to drive me out from Waikiki, but they can’t.”

  “Who’s trying to drive you out?”

  “The young blood. They smell the money. They get the politicians on their side and get us old Hawaiians kicked out from Waikiki. They say we’re too old, too dumb about the way the beach is now. No worry. I fight when I have to. You come over here and I can find you work on the beach. Do what you want to do, bruddah. But make sure you think about it first. Make sure you think long.”

  “How’s everybody doing? Beachboys. People on the beach.”

  “Samuel’s still in the wrestling. Getting bigger all the time. Remember the Red Scorpion? Bomber Kulkovich? Samuel’s bigger now. He’s heavyweight champion now. He beat Tosh Togo. He beat Lord Blears. Samuel
says it’s all in the script. Sometimes he wrestles tag team. My son started the wrestling too. They call him Little Boat. Little Boat and Samuel might go together in a tag-team. Long time ago they wanted me to do the wrestling but I can’t follow the scripts. I didn’t want to do it so I didn’t do it.

  “Another thing. Old Man Kamakana passed a month ago. No. Six weeks ago it was. We paddled him out on a Sunday morning. I took him his beer that night. Blue’s still here on the beach. Rabbit’s still here. Panama and Chick still here. I bet you never heard about Chick’s jars and sacks.”

  “No. What jars and sacks?”

  “Chick’s been on Waikiki a long time. He got here way before I did and he used to walk the beach every night after work before he went home. He waited till the rest of us were gone. Everybody gone. He put away his beach chairs and umbrellas real slow, waiting for us to be gone. He never told us about it because he figured we’d all walk the beach every night like he did. Right before dark Chick walked from the Royal all the way down past the Moana, past Kuhio Beach almost to the Natatorium. I was here way back when they built the Natatorium. I was here in small kid time when they opened it up on Duke Kahanamoku’s birthday.

  “Chick found all kinds of stuff in the sand, in the shallow water, and he kept it all in jars. He hides those jars in his beach shed. Low tide was the best to find stuff. The stuff he couldn’t fit in the jars he saved in the sacks. He found plenty money. Plenty false teeth. Plenty gold rings and diamond rings and gold bracelets and gold watches. Guns with bullets inside. Knives. A fake leg made out of wood. Fake tits made out of some kind of rubber. Glass eyes. Wigs that washed off bald guys when they swam. Once he found a big toe or a thumb but he couldn’t for sure tell which it was and he never saved it. He found it way down there by the Natatorium. Chick finds more now than he ever did before because it’s so crowded now, but he says he wishes it wasn’t crowded. He thinks he might sell all the stuff he found and retire. That’s why he told me about it. There’s a big new hotel where the Outrigger Club used to be. When the Royal and Moana were the only hotels was the good time, Mike. The last good times.”

  “It’s still that way in my mind. Thanks for talking. Mahalo. It’s always good to talk to you.”

  “No need to thank. Always good to talk to you. You know that. You got to say aloha now?”

  “Maybe I should. I guess so.”

  “One more thing to tell you. Out at the uhu place I saw Kanaloa. Kanaloa is the sea god, the ocean god. He’s the god with the mana, the power, the luck. He can give the mana to anybody he wants, and now I know I got all the mana I need. Now I’m passing some mana to you through this phone. Aloha, Mike. Anytime you want to talk, you call.”

  “You saw Kanaloa?”

  “Yes.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “I listened to him. He said Bruddah Death is coming for me. You hear what he says inside your mind. It’s not like a voice. It’s more clear than that. Maybe you don’t believe me. Most people don’t, but it’s true. Someday I prove it to you. You wait. I promise I will. I wouldn’t tell you if I couldn’t prove it. For now you got the mana.”

  “Bruddah Death? What’s that mean?”

  “It means he’s coming. Kanaloa said so. It’s no worry, bruddah. Bruddah Death comes for everybody.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “If I’m sick I don’t know it. I feel like I always feel. You believe I saw Kanaloa? You believe I heard what he said?”

  “If you say so, I believe it.”

  “You believe I can prove it to you?”

  “If you say you will, I believe it.”

  “I will. No big hurry but I will. No big hurry about the proof. Aloha, Mike.”

  “Aloha, Boat.”

  “Aloha, bruddah.”

  Two weeks later an envelope arrived at my APO address in Bamberg. Inside was $500 in cash, ten fifty-dollar bills, and a note from Boat. The note, scrawled in pencil on a scrap of brown wrapping paper, read: You need little bit money to start. Aloha, bruddah Mike. Those were the only words he ever wrote to me. In those days $500 was a small fortune. I have no idea how Boat found my APO address.

  The next letter I received from Hawaii came from my old friend Samuel many months later:

  Howzit Mike—

  Our friend Boat passed. He told me you two talked on the phone. We talked about you plenty. He told me I should write you this letter when it was time. He died in his chair on his front porch. I bet he was looking out at the ocean. Tomorrow we paddle him out to his special place. Plenty people coming to the service. Plenty canoes be going out tomorrow. Wish you could be here. Keep Boat and his aloha in your heart.

  Hawaii isn’t the same. Waikiki isn’t the same. The good part is that Boat always will be here. I think about you. Keep my aloha inside your heart.

  Reading Samuel’s letter, I realized I’d never once visited Boat at his home, never known him anywhere except the beach, the place he had told me so often was where he belonged.

  Epilogue

  I was stationed back at Ord, putting in the final months before my discharge. Hilde was pregnant, we had little money besides what Boat had sent, and our hope—our dire need—was that the baby would arrive before my discharge.

  In the afternoons I worked out with the Fort Ord basketball team and, in the mornings, I typed up orders at post headquarters. The most competitive basketball games we played were against the inmate team at Soledad State Prison. The most meaningful orders I typed were those sending the first American soldiers to Vietnam.

  The one-room apartment Hilde and I rented two blocks above Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey was so tiny that when we lowered the Murphy bed from the wall the front door couldn’t be opened. We owned several books, a used radio, a small phonograph, and two long-playing records. Once a week we went out for pizza, once a month to a movie, and every Sunday morning we bought the San Francisco Chronicle. Much of our free time was spent walking the nearby beaches. And we were happy.

  Our son Pete was born with four days to spare.

  We drove an old black Pontiac north with Pete in a straw basket on the back seat, all our possessions stowed in the trunk, and $580 in my wallet.

  Thanks to Boat’s money and to the mana he had blessed me with, things worked out. I found a decent-paying job as a “miscellaneous helper” at a wholesale butcher shop south of Market Street in San Francisco.

  We answered an ad for an affordable apartment in the Sunset District, a few blocks up a steep hill from Golden Gate Park. The tenant, an elderly widow, would be spending three years in Europe. She decided to let us have her place because she was certain a German woman would keep it neat and clean.

  I thought long and hard about everything Boat had told me. I’d always enjoyed reading and writing, and my facility with words had allowed me to rise through school like a helium-filled balloon. San Francisco State College had a highly regarded creative writing program, so I enrolled in night classes there, intending to earn both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English Language Arts, and then find a college teaching job.

  The classes and writing went well. I had outstanding teachers—Wright Morris, William Wiegand, Kay Boyle, Clay Putman, Richard Dickey, Herbert Kubly, John Gardner, Mark Linenthal—and they liked my work and encouraged me.

  The job at the meat company consisted of eight-hour days in a huge windowless room kept at a low temperature—a long day of lugging sides of beef and hoisting tons of bull meat with a pitchfork into a giant grinder. After work I had time to get home, shower, and eat, and then head for my night classes.

  After a few months I found an easier job with comparable pay as a clerk at a steamship company. There I filled out bills of lading, including many listing hundreds of tons of military supplies for shipment to Vietnam.

  The free speech movement began in Berkeley, and soon hippies arrived on the scene. Hilde and I watched everything with interest.

  We joined in civil rights and antiwar demonstrations
whenever we could.

  During my last year at San Francisco State Hilde took a secretarial job at Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company while I stayed home to care for Pete and write my master’s thesis.

  The thesis, a short novel, won a regional writing award.

  I found a teaching job at Southern Oregon College in Ashland.

  After twenty years I was back with my ohana in the same kinds of hills and streams my great-grandfather had taught me to love in Pennsylvania.

  Yes, we had extraordinary luck. It all seemed easy.

  The years passed, producing unsurprising problems big and small, and with enduring happiness. Hilde and I now have a son, a daughter, and three grandchildren, all here in our hometown of Ashland. We visit Bamberg and Hawaii often. We know how lucky we are.

  Boat waited a long time to offer his proof.

  Three years ago as I wrote this we spent a spring vacation with our daughter and two grandsons in Zihuatanejo on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Billy, fourteen at the time, went parasailing one afternoon while the rest of us watched nervously. Towed by a powerboat far beneath him, Billy sailed a mile north along the coast, then made a sweeping turn and came back over the blue sea and landed safely on the beach, about fifty yards from a pond of crocodiles.

  With Billy’s urging, I decided to try it the next afternoon.

  Two young Mexican men buckled the heavy leather harnesses around my chest and shoulders and gave me directions on how to control my descent at the end of my flight.

  I was lifted smoothly off the warm sand and out over the blue water. The surprise was that, within seconds, I was so high above the sea that nothing below me could be heard, not even the sound of the powerful motor that pulled me along.

  All I felt was warm wind in my face and all I saw was the blue sky and the sea underneath me, until the frigate birds appeared—the iwas. Every day from the beach, or from chest-deep water while we waited for a set of waves with our boogie boards, I had seen frigate birds circling high out over the deep water. These that appeared beside me seemed to materialize from nowhere, six of them, three on each side, only yards away. For the first time in my life I saw them clearly—the iridescent black feathers, the long downward-curving beaks, the red throat patches and white bellies.