Blue Skin of the Sea

by Graham Salisbury

  Keo and I liked Jack because he was always surprising us, and we hung around with him just to see what he’d do or say next. He had the power to hold us speechless with the things he told us, like all the stuff about the seventh and eighth graders. And he had the advantage of being taller than anyone else in school, at least two inches taller than me, and one taller than Keo. He never went barefoot to school like the rest of us but always wore black tennis shoes and jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up His hair was usually greased back, with a clump hanging down over his forehead. He was Keo’s age, but seemed older because of his size, and because he knew so much more about the world than we did.

  “Just wait till next year,” he told Keo. “You’d better learn to protect yourself because you’re going to get into a lot of fights in the seventh grade.” All Jack’s talk pulled Keo under, like a whirlpool. You could see it on his face, and in his eyes, and in the two vertical scowl lines between his eyebrows.

  When school let out Mrs. Carvalho made all seven of us sit along one wall of her office. Everyone had gone home except the teachers. She glared across her desk at us for several minutes before saying anything, looking as if she were trying to determine which one of us had the nerve to run the mongoose up the flagpole.

  “I know one of you boys put that mongoose up there,” she finally said. “And I know that you all know who it was, because you have that guilty look on your faces.”

  We sat there staring at the floor.

  “Bobby Otani,” she said. “What do you know about this?” Mrs. Carvalho was pretty smart, going straight to the one most likely to tell her what she wanted to know. But Bobby just shrugged his shoulders.

  She asked each of us the same question and got nothing but shrugs, and silence, or a whispered “I don’t know.” Then she made us sit for about twenty minutes while she worked at her desk, as if we weren’t there at all.

  Just as I was about to doze off, Mrs. Carvalho stood up. “Okay, boys,” she said. “You can go, but I want you to remember that I’ll be keeping my eyes on you.” As we started to leave, she tipped her head toward Jack and added, “You boys should be setting a better example for our new student.”

  A few weeks later, just after midnight on a Saturday night, Jack stole his stepfather’s car and picked up Keo, then Bobby Otani, then me. When Jack had learned that none of us ever snuck out at night, he couldn’t believe it. In California everyone sneaks out, he said, then told us to be on the road in front of our houses at midnight.

  With the dogs all standing around watching me, I climbed out of my bedroom window, just as Jack had told me to do. Dad was asleep in the living room. I could hear his breathing through the wall. I wore shorts and a sweatshirt, though the night air at sea level was still warm.

  Jack’s stepfather’s car was a brand new green Oldsmobile four-door that reflected moonlight off its shiny hood as it approached, lights flashing off and on as a signal. The road went black when Jack pulled up and turned off the headlights.

  Keo sat in front with Uncle Harley’s twenty-two. Bobby was in the back. He stuck his head out the open window. “Come on, get in,” he said, almost whispering. Keo and Jack kept quiet. I slid in next to Bobby, and Jack turned the car around in our driveway. I wondered what Dad would say if he found out what I was doing.

  “Where we going?” I asked.

  “Shoot rats/’Jack said. “At the dump”

  “You don’t want to be up at the dump at night without a gun,” Bobby said. “I heard there’s a crazy man living there, but no one has ever seen him. He hides in the day and only roams the dump at night, looking for food. Isn’t that right, Keo?”

  “That’s what I heard,” Keo said.

  If Keo had heard it, I would have heard it, too, and I hadn’t. Still, it could be true. Who knew what went on up there? The dump was a strange enough place in full daylight. Something was always moving around—birds, rats, wild cats and starved dogs, mongooses. Why not a crazy man?

  “Where’d you learn to drive?” I asked Jack.

  “It’s easy. The car’s automatic, they’re always automatic. That’s what my stepfather likes. Anyone can drive this thing.”

  “He knows you drive it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Does he know you have it now?”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s more fun to steal it,” Keo said, sounding as if he’d known Jack for years.

  “It’s not stealing,” Jack said. “I just borrowed it for a while.”

  Keo sat like an army guard, holding the twenty-two straight up, butt on the floor, like a flagpole. He glanced out the window on his side of the car as if driving around in the middle of the night were something he did all the time.

  I leaned forward with my arms on the back of Keo’s seat, peering into the beams of light exposing the old road up to the dump. We were like a small band of outlaws heading for a crime, the four of us riding silently. Getting caught wasn’t even a passing concern. I felt invincible.

  Jack drove slowly into the dump a huge, sloping, rectangular area carved out of the jungle of trees on the side of the mountain, far enough away from the village so you couldn’t smell it. Carefully he snaked his stepfather’s spotless car around broken glass and watery mud holes. The smell of the dump was different in the cool night air, not sickly like it was in the heat of the day, but sharp and biting.

  Just above the dump itself was a flat area wide enough to turn a truck around. The dump flowed downhill in heaps and rolls. Jack parked the car on the edge of the turnaround, facing the downward slope, and turned off the headlights, then the engine. We waited a moment, listening to night noises coming up from the moonlight-gray field of garbage below.

  “You got the flashlight?” Jack asked.

  Keo flicked it on and sent a beam down to an old refrigerator lying on its side. Then he turned it off and with a length of fishing line strapped it to the barrel of Uncle Harley’s rifle.

  “What are you doing that for?” Bobby asked, as excited about being at the dump as a dog in a Jeep

  “So we can see what we’re shooting at, what do you think?”

  We got out of the car and stood on the edge, looking down into the ghostly mounds, black trees all around, a bright ring of illuminated mist around the moon. Jack took the rifle from Keo and turned on the flashlight. The beam followed the path of his aim, first lighting up a bottle, then a tire. “Pow!” he said, then shut the light off. “Listen.”

  Things were alive and moving around below us, noises from the far corners, tin cans tipping over somewhere in the middle. Jack turned the light back on and aimed the rifle around the dump until the beam reflected the glassy eyes of a mongoose, frozen between steps, low to the ground and ratlike. Jack shot. The bullet winged it, and it squealed and flipped around a couple of times, then disappeared into the garbage.

  We had to stay up on the dirt part because we were barefoot.

  Jack wore his black tennis shoes but didn’t want to go down into the dump alone. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Find a cat. This place is loaded with them.” The beam flopped around in the trees as he handed me the rifle. Keo said he thought he’d seen one over to the left when Jack was running the light around.

  “How about a bottle?”

  “Don’t be a sissy. Go on, shine the light around.”

  I moved the beam slowly over the mounds just below us, maybe the length of eight cars away, and found a mongoose.

  “Go ahead,” Jack said. “Take a practice shot.”

  It was an easy target, like the coffee cans Keo and I set up in the pastures around his house. The mongoose didn’t squeal when I hit it, just fell into a small hump and didn’t move.

  “Good shot!” Keo said.

  Jack didn’t say anything. I kept the beam on the dead mongoose, its brown body looking like a pile of mud. I’d never killed an animal before. I felt sick to my stomach. In Kona everyone shot mongooses, even Dad. They were pests, they got into your
garbage, into your garage, into your cooled trash fires, and made a racket under your house. Still, I felt like there was a hole in me and all the excitement of the night was quickly draining away.

  “Now find a cat,” Jack said. “You want to be in the Black Widows, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Then your test is to shoot a cat.”

  “But … ”

  “A cat. Shoot one or forget about the Widows.”

  We spent an hour or so looking around for cats but only found more mongooses. Even the crazy man wasn’t there, but that didn’t stop Jack from trying to scare us with sudden moves, whispering things like, “What was that?

  Jack drove fast going back down to sea level, jabbering the whole way with Keo. I sat in the backseat hanging on to a grip on the door. Jack bet Keo he could drive through the village without getting caught and slowed when we dropped down toward the pier from Palani Road.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Jack said, half turning toward the back seat. “You two want to be Black Widows, right? Well, Sonny can go back up to the dump and shoot the cat. That should prove he wants to be in bad enough. And you, Bobby, can put it in a bag, and hide it in Mrs. Carvalho’s office.”

  “What?” Bobby said. “I could get kicked out of school for that.”

  “Take it or leave it,” Jack said. Keo kept quiet, as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other whether Bobby or I became Black Widows.

  I thought the whole thing was stupid. “Why do we have to prove ourselves, and not you?” I asked.

  “Because I’m the leader.”

  I sat back in the seat trying to figure out how everything had gotten so confusing since Jack had come to the island. Now Keo was a Black Widow, and almost a stranger.

  Jack glanced over his shoulder as he drove. “Of anyone in this car, you should be begging to be a Black Widow.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I mean Begging with a capital B, white boy.”

  My forehead tightened, my eyes closed to slits.

  White boy?

  “White,” Jack went on. “As in you’re gonna get your butt kicked in seventh grade. They don’t like white boys up there.”

  Keo was dead silent, staring straight ahead. I wanted him to say something—that Jack didn’t know what he was talking about—but he didn’t. White boy? Is that how it was? Is that how Keo saw me? I was like Keo … wasn’t I? He was darker, but wasn’t I as Hawaiian as he was on the inside?

  “White boy or Black Widow,” Jack said with finality. “You choose.”

  We made it through town without getting caught, because there was no one around to catch us. The street was empty and pale under the few lights along the road. Bobby talked the whole way down to my house about what Mrs. Carvalho would do when she found the cat in her office.

  Just before we got to my driveway, Jack pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the headlights. I got out and peered back into the car. Jack leaned forward, a shadowy silhouette staring past Keo at me. “Get the cat,” he said.

  Keo looked away when I caught his eye, and said, “See you.”

  Thick trees on either side of our rocky driveway reached out toward me, their night shadows swallowing up the moonlight. Beyond, the trail of the moon lay like a ribbon of silk on a quiet sea.

  The dogs heard me and came trotting out. I crept into the house, past Dad, sleeping, and gently closed the door to my room. Except for the low hiss of the surf, the night was silent.

  I sat on my bed and stared out the window, hearing the faint echo of Jack’s command—get the cat.

  A week later Grampa Joe drove down and picked up Keo, and then me, and took us back to his place to help out with his coffee orchard, a small, five-acre farm with about twenty-five hundred trees. He paid us fifty cents an hour when he needed help.

  In the morning we spread rat poison around the edges of the orchard, then sprayed diesel oil in among the trees where weeds had started poking through. Later Grampa Joe wanted us to help him gather up and haul off some old boards and tires that had cluttered his yard for as long as I could remember. Tutu Max must have gotten after him.

  At noon the three of us sat out in the yard, in a small grassy area, one of several flat terraces that stumbled down from the road above. Grampa Joe’s whole place was on a hill, as was all of Kona, except down along the coast where I lived. The island itself was just the top of a deep undersea mountain rising out of the Pacific Ocean.

  All morning I’d been thinking about how Keo had become so quiet and moody. Jack seemed to consume him, to consume all of us with his stories about high school, and with the fear and doubt that settled in behind them. “Forget that junk that Jack says,” I finally told Keo.

  “You don’t know your brains from a dead jellyfish,” he answered, staring me down with squinting eyes.

  “So what are you boys up to at school?” Grampa Joe asked.

  Keo shrugged, eating one of the tuna sandwiches Tutu Max had made for us. Grampa Joe turned to me, and I shrugged, too. He kept looking at me, waiting.

  “Keo’s a Black Widow,” I finally said. “It’s a gang.”

  Keo held the sandwich in one hand while he ate, staring off into the trees.

  Grampa Joe took a drink out of an old, dented silver thermos, then peeked over at Keo. “What do Black Widows do?”

  Keo shrugged again. “Nothing … just hang around.”

  Grampa Joe picked at the grass, then shook his head and laughed, once, like a humph. “Black Widows,” he mumbled.

  “I’m going to be one, too,” I said.

  “What do you mean, going to be?”

  “I have to shoot a cat first, to prove I’m worthy.”

  “Sheese, are you kidding? Really? Shoot a cat? Whose stupid idea was that?” He glanced at Keo, but Keo just kept on eating his sandwich.

  “A boy named Jack,” I said. “He’s the leader. It was his idea to make the Black Widows.”

  Grampa Joe watched me, waiting for more. “Shoot a cat?”

  Keo glared at me.

  I looked down at the grass, thinking I’d better not say too much more. “A cat,” I said, almost in a whisper.

  “You want cats? We’ll see lots of them when we take this junk to the dump,” Grampa Joe said. “No loss if you shoot one, but what a stupid idea. What does that prove? Nothing. Only that you can shoot.” He turned to Keo. “Did you have to shoot one, too?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a sixth grader,” I said. “So is Jack.”

  Grampa Joe nodded, then shook his head and continued eating his lunch in silence, curling his blackened, diesel-oil-covered fingers around the white bread of his sandwich as if they were as clean as the inside of a mango.

  On the way to the dump Grampa Joe stopped by Keo’s house so we could get the twenty-two. Boards stuck out of the back of the old car, the trunk wide open. Grampa Joe didn’t even bother to tie it down. We’d have to make two trips, there was so much stuff.

  The dump was quiet when we got there, no other people around. But the dogs were out, skittish, bone-sided, emaciated creatures poking around down near the lower end. Mongooses were everywhere, scurrying from cover to cover, long and sleek, with ratty tails the length of their bodies. After we emptied out Grampa Joe’s trunk, Keo took some shots at them, hitting nothing. The noise scared the dogs off, but they slunk back when the shooting stopped.

  “Sonny,” Grampa Joe said, pointing off to the right at a spot halfway down, away from the dogs and mongooses. “A cat. Hard to see right now. Wait a minute,” he said. “She’ll move.”

  I squinted into the sun, then shielded my eyes with my hand. The cat moved, a spotted one, mostly orange and black, looking like it was stalking something. It picked its paws up slowly, one at a time, and held them in the air before each step

  Keo handed me the twenty-two. I climbed down off the edge and picked my way through the debris, this time with a pair of thongs on my feet. Grampa
Joe and Keo squatted low to the ground behind me, watching.

  Like the mongoose, the cat was an easy target. I followed it in the notch, the bead on its shoulder. The wooden stock against my cheek was sun-warm and the casing smelted of clean oil, even through the stench of the dump I could have shot and joined the Black Widows immediately.

  But I moved the barrel a fraction of an inch to the left and fired, missing by a foot. The cat jumped, then disappeared into the field of decaying camouflage.

  “You pantie,” Keo said, standing up

  Grampa Joe stayed down on his heels, laughing silently and shaking his head, as if he’d known all along that I’d never shoot the cat.

  I shrugged, and said, “Missed.”

  “No kidding,” Keo said, crossing his arms and turning his head to the side to spit.

  Grampa Joe picked up a stick and creaked himself up then stepped down off the edge. He poked around in the garbage and came up with a rancid-smelling ribbon of something that looked like squid. “Use this,” he said, holding it out to me on the end of the stick. “Set a trap Bombye she come back—and Keo and I come back, too. Next load. You wait here, she come back.”

  After the car had bounced out to the main road I picked my way down to where the cat had been. I found it in a small cave formed in the folds of a pile of cardboard boxes. Its eyes flashed out at me, like coins wrapped in cellophane. It wasn’t alone. Four multicolored kittens shrunk back next to it as I peeked in. The mother hissed at me, and tolerated my being there as long as I didn’t move around. I squatted down and watched them, holding as still as the old refrigerator.

  After a while the kittens began to get restless, creeping slowly out of the shadows into the sun. Though wary of me, they got braver, jumping over each other and spreading out around the mouth of the cave. The mother stayed where she was, her front feet tucked up under her.

  I laid the squid an arm’s length away, moving as slowly as I could. Three of the kittens came over to sniff at it, one by one. The fourth wouldn’t get anywhere near it. But one of the three brave ones inched its way around the squid, coming within reach, as if it had forgotten I was there, a dirty white one, with a splatter of black and orange spots on it.