“Yeah, that’s true. But … ”
Keo stuck his thumb out at the first car to come by, and it stopped. He got in, and when he saw that I wasn’t coming with him, he slammed the door. “She’s not pulling me around by the nose,” he said, hanging out the window as the car drove away.
The sun was high, and the pavement was hot. When there were no cars around, I hurried up the middle of the road on the broken white line, which was cooler than the blacktop
When I finally caught up with Melanie, she just kept on going in silence. The road began to twist and climb up toward the mountain, and the trees and grasses pushed out over the edges of the blacktop She passed the trail into the lava tube without seeing it.
“That was the trail,” I said.
She stopped and looked at me for the first time since I’d caught ùp with her, then she peeked around me.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“Went to the beach.”
“Good.”
I glanced down the road, then back at Melanie. “He’s not as bad as he seems,” I said. “He’s just mad about not getting to go fishing with Uncle Harley. Aunty Pearl made him stay home because you were coming.”
She stared straight at me and I had to look back down the road again. “I didn’t know that,” she said. “Want to come with me?”
I shrugged and said, “Sure.”
I followed her into the trees wondering what Keo was doing just then—and what he was going to say the next time I saw him.
What a crazy day. All morning this girl had treated us like small petoots, and here I was following her around in the jungle, and liking it.
Melanie surprised me by the way she climbed down into the hole in the ground, as if she were getting into a car, she was so fearless. I followed her, nervously groping around in the dark, hoping I wouldn’t grab a bat or something else that moved. Soon we sat facing each other in an open area around the first bend in the lava tube. It was about as far as we could go before complete blackness.
“Let’s go farther in,” she whispered.
I couldn’t see her face, only the faintest outline of her head. “Melanie, what Keo said was true.”
“Shhh,” she said, touching my arm.
I shut up and listened, thinking she’d heard something. Then a light went on.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
Melanie held a flashlight under her chin, shooting the light upward, making grim shadows over her face.
“Off the boat. And then there’s this.” She held out the neatly looped and bundled fishing line that she’d gotten from Uncle Raz. “Now we can go into pure darkness.”
She crawled back out into the light around the bend and motioned for me to follow. She tied one end of the fishing line to a large rock, working quickly. “What do you think?” she asked.
It wasn’t the best knot I’d seen, but it would do. Melanie smiled, then said, “Ready?”
“I guess so.”
The tube narrowed and twisted and turned off at sharp angles and opened into big areas, only to shrink again into nearly impassable slits. And like the branches of a tree it shot off into side alleys or completely new mile-long tunnels for all I could tell. At one point we had to get down on our stomachs and squeeze through to go any farther. On the other side was a large, round room. Water dripped from one wall and fell into a small mud hole. The air was cold, and the room smelled like a rusty Jeep in a junk pile after a rain.
“This should be far enough,” she said, so low I could barely hear her. It was one time I agreed with her completely. We sat next to each other and leaned against the dry side of the room.
Then Melanie turned the flashlight off.
Neither of us moved. I held my breath in honor, I suppose, of the complete and utter lack of light, so profound, so foreign. I couldn’t believe that my eyes were wide open and finding it absolutely impossible to focus on anything at all. Something would appear, I thought, as my eyes adjusted. But everything remained completely black. And if it weren’t for the dripping water, the silence would have been every bit as piercing as the darkness.
“Wow,” Melanie whispered. “Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.”
We sat without speaking for a long time, listening to the drip A voice kept chattering on somewhere inside my mind, rushing in to fill the empty spaces, not knowing what to do with this new state of being.
Then, as if floating down from a heavy mist that filtered through tall eucalyptus trees on the high midlands of Mauna Kea, I heard what was without question the most beautiful sound I’d ever thought possible to hear.
A voice. Clear, crisp, gentle. Perfect.
“Pupu, binubinu, pupu, binubinu e … ”
When Aunty Pearl had told Keo and me that Melanie McNeil could sing like an angel it had passed over me in less time than I spent thinking about the dirt under my fingernails. But now that voice was inside me, moving outward, soothing my uneasiness about being in the blackness, and igniting feelings I never knew I had.
For a time my own inner voice stopped its yakking, and listened.
“… o ke kaba kai …”
I sat perfectly still, as if the slightest movement would cause her to stop. The sound of her voice drenched me in heat, fanning a growing fire in my chest, and sending strange tingling sensations wisping down my arms. I saw myself on a breathless sea in uncharted waters, standing at the rail of an old schooner, waiting for a sign, waiting for something to happen. Then I was underwater, gagging. Don’t you ever do that again … I put my hands over my ears as if to silence the awful, unex-plainable dream-memory. What was it? I almost said something to Melanie, but didn’t.
“… .pupu, binubinu e … ”
When she stopped, and all was silent again, I willed the voice to return, trying to absorb the sound, knowing this was a moment I’d never forget. The wrenching dream-memory left me shaking. I wanted to be closer to Melanie, to have her sing again, to calm me down.
Then I heard her crying, softly.
“Melanie? What’s wrong?”
I waited, listening to the dripping water while her trembling slowed.
“Daddy’s sick. He almost died. He’s in the hospital with pneumonia.” She was silent a moment, then went on. “My mother sent me here so she could be with him.” She started crying again. “What if he dies?”
“Yeah,” I said, barely whispering.
Thau what she was crying about in Keo’s room.
The heavy blackness of the lava tube closed in on me. What if be died?
What if my Dad died? My tongue felt dry, remembering Waiakea Town.
I fumbled around on the ground with my hand until I found Melanie. I traced her position. She was sitting with her knees up and her arms folded across her chest. She reached for my hand when I touched her. The palm of her hand, where it met with mine, was damp. I felt it trembling. I could feel her wiping her eyes with her free hand. We sat in silence a long time. I wanted to tell her that my mother had died. But I didn’t.
“Let’s get out of here,” Melanie finally said.
She turned on the flashlight and every drifting thought disappeared. The presence of light alone changed everything— the song, the feelings, the fears. Gone. As if they’d never been there.
We followed the fishing line, crawling back out into the crushing light of day, then walked back through the trees without speaking. Melanie followed a few steps behind me, her bare feet as sure and as tough as mine. I thought about her parents, and about being alone.
“Hey,” I said, “I want to show you something.”
She let me lead her away from the trail. I veered south through an overgrown jungle of grass and trees, over ancient rock walls and under giant, hard, and brittle kiawe groves. My shirt dampened in the heat and stuck to my back and chest, turning the dust from the cave dark brown.
On a small rise I found what I’d wanted to show her—the old rock foundation of the first missionary house built on the island of Hawai
i, now abandoned for more than a century.
“This must have been the living room,” I said half jokingly as we stood on a flat area that seemed to have the best view of the landscape. “A young man and woman, not much older than us, lived here more than a hundred years ago. Built the house themselves, around 1820. It took them six months just to get here to the islands. They left everyone they knew behind and didn’t know a soul when they climbed off the boat. Thau alone.”
Aunty Pearl had told me about the old homestead, and Keo and I went looking for it one day. The first time I’d walked through the ruins I was amazed that two young people from Massachusetts had actually sailed away from their home to a place and culture they knew nothing about. After discovering this place I spent hours on the rocks in front of my house, staring out at the ocean and wondering what was out there beyond the far horizon.
Melanie picked something out of the dirt, a chip from a blue and white plate. She cleaned it off and showed it to me. “I wonder if this was from one of their plates.”
“Probably was. No one else has lived here.”
She smiled at me and put the chip in her bag. “I’m going to keep this to remember you by. Come on, let’s go back up to Aunty Pearl’s.”
On the way out to the road she reached over and took my hand, in daylight. The feel of her skin touching mine wasn’t at all the same as when Dad put his hand on my shoulder, or when Keo and I would shake to seal a bet. There was some kind of invisible fluid that flowed out of Melanie, then raced through me like lightning, and inhabited my entire body. Is this what girls do? Melt down a boy’s body and soul? It didn’t matter that she probably only took my hand because she was worried about her father. For the next few minutes even the bulls in the pasture couldn’t have taken my attention away from Melanie McNeil.
By the time we left Hualalai Road and headed up the old dirt driveway to Keo’s house, a long rain line cut the landscape a mile or so farther up.
When we turned the bend in the road and Keo’s house came into view, the dogs started barking and running toward us. Aunty Pearl was going to have a pigpen full of questions when she found out Keo wasn’t with us.
“We can’t go up there yet,” I said, holding Melanie back. “We have to wait for Keo.”
Melanie frowned. “Why?”
“Aunty Pearl’s going to want to know why he’s not with us, and if we tell her he went to the beach instead of staying with you he’s going to get into a heap of trouble.”
“Ah,” she said. “Yes … ”
Bullet and Blossom came running up, wagging their tails and sniffing around Melanie. I turned and pulled her back down the road. “We can wait for him at the bottom of the driveway, under the mango tree.”
“Hooie!” Aunty Pearl called from the porch, waving down tous.
“Dangf“ I muttered. “Now we’re in for some explaining.”
Aunty Pearl scowled at me when I told her that Keo and I had somehow gotten separated, then she ushered Melanie into the house as if she’d been lost at sea for a week.
Keo came walking up the dusty driveway an hour and a half later. Melanie was sitting next to me on the porch telling me about Honolulu. I’d almost forgotten Keo, I was so absorbed in the sound of her voice so close to my ear and in the warmth coming off her arm less than an inch from mine.
Keo stared at the ground as he came up toward us, as if he were in deep thought over something. And he didn’t look too fired-up about seeing the two of us. In fact he stormed on by without a word, as if we weren’t even there.
Aunty Pearl’s voice rang through the house and out onto the porch. Keo must have whispered back, or said nothing at all, it was so quiet after Aunty Pearl had her say.
Then a door slammed.
“I’m going in and explain to Keo what happened.”
“Maybe you’d better leave him alone and let him cool off,” Melanie said. But I couldn’t sit still.
I knocked once and opened the door to Keo’s room. He was lying on his bed with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
“What do you want?” he said when I’d closed the door.
“We were going to wait for you but didn’t think about it until it was too late.”
“Yeah, sure you were.”
“Listen, it’s true. Melanie and I were … ”
“Why don’t you just buzz off,” he said.
“What … ?”
“I said buzz off, beat it, go home already.” He sat up with a snap and glared at me.
“Hey,” I said. “What are you getting so bent about, it was you who left.”
“And now it’s time for you to leave!” he said, standing up “First I can’t go fishing because I have to baby-sit, then you take off and get me in trouble, and now I gotta stay home tomorrow … all because of you and that stuck-up queen out there!” Keo pushed me as he talked.
“Now wait a minute,” I said, ignoring the push. “Melanie … ”
“Melanie? Melanie?”
Keo shoved me again, harder. I lost my balance and fell back into the door.
“Come on!” Keo, said calling me to him with his hands. “You the pantie.”
I got up and dove at him, hitting him in the stomach with my shoulder. We fell back to his bed, then rolled off onto the floor, grunting, sputtering. He got me in a headlock and squeezed until I could feel my ears burn.
The door flew open and Aunty Pearl’s voice boomed into the room.
”Keo!”
We lay on the floor still gripping each other, breathing hard.
“Sonny, you better go home now,” Aunty Pearl said.
“Yeah, pantie,” Keo added, spitting out the pantie part.
“You shut your mouth!” Aunty Pearl said. “You going stay this room till Daddy gets home.”
I pulled myself free and backed away from Keo. Melanie stood behind Aunty Pearl, peeking around the door. I brushed by without looking at her and stomped out into the yard. My ears ached and the skin on my face felt as if I’d washed it with a burlap bag. It was the first big fight Keo and I had ever gotten into, and I hated him.
It was quiet down at my house with Dad gone. I made a peanut butter and banana sandwich and went out by the ocean to think about everything that had happened that day. The only thing I would have done differently was take Melanien advice and have left Keo alone to cool off.
Later that evening the phone rang.
“Hi,” Melanie said in a voice I recognized instantly. “What are you doing?”
“Not much. Just sitting around. Is Keo still all bent out of shape?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
I couldn’t think of anything more to say. I hoped she’d come up with something, because I didn’t want her to hang up.
“Aunty Pearl told him she wouldn’t tell Uncle Harley about it if he’d apologize to me,” she added.
“Did he?”
“Sort of. But I don’t care. Aunty Pearl said he was too bullheaded for his own good.”
“She’s right about that.”
“Let’s do something tomorrow,” Melanie said. “It’s the only day Aunty Pearl hasn’t planned something for me.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. How about swimming at the hotel?”
“You can only swim there if you’re staying there,” I told her.
She paused a moment, then said, “Wanna bet?”
The next day we met at Kona Inn, at the big saltwater swimming pool, just as we’d planned. But when she got there she didn’t like it. “It’s too crowded. Let’s go somewhere more private.”
I looked around, as if I were thinking of a place to go, but was really wondering what she had in mind by more private.
“Where can we go where there aren’t any people around?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Out by the airport?”
“Sounds good to me.”
It was a long walk under a relentless sun, but worth every burning step T
he thing about Melanie was that I couldn’t ever tell what she was thinking. I got the feeling that when I wasn’t looking at her, she was looking at me. It thrilled me to think that it might be true. But whenever I glanced at her, she’d turn away. Once, though, just before we got to the beach, I peeked over and she looked straight back at me, without hiding it. We both just stood there looking into each other’s eyes. It made my breathing shallow.
Then she smiled, and turned away.
From then on I had to fight myself to keep from staring at her, because staring at her was everything in the world I wanted to do. Nothing else mattered. Anywhere.
“There’s a big tidal pool just beyond those rocks,” I said when we got out by the airport. “Not many people come this far to go swimming.”
“Good,” she said. “I hope no one’s there now.”
The pool was shallow and warm, almost too warm. And the beach around it was deserted. She waded in up to her knees, then reached down and lifted out a dripping handful of seawa-ter. She studied the pool, the sand, and the rocks around it, and the blue, blue ocean beyond. I drifted off in my mind to some lost island in the deep South Pacific. We were shipwrecked— just the two of us.
I must have looked pretty dreamy, because Melanie splashed me. She glowed under a brilliant sun, wading back to shore. She ran back up on the sand and threw down her towel, then took off her shorts and blouse. Underneath, she wore a light green bikini that sent my mind reeling. “Come on,” she said, running back into the water.
We lolled around in the tidal pool for a while, sitting on the bottom up to our necks, then swimming around slowly, like a couple of porpoises, bumping arms and talking about everything we could think of.
When my fingers started to shrivel up from being in the water so long, 1 got out and lay down on my stomach in the sand. The hot sun felt good on my back. Melanie got out, too, and lay next to me on her side, propped up on one elbow. She ran her fingertips over my back, lightly, in small swirls.
“Have you ever kissed a girl?” she asked.
I rolled over on my back. What kind of question was that?
Blue Skin of the Sea Page 12
