Blue Skin of the Sea

by Graham Salisbury

  Keo raised his eyebrows. “You sly eel. You’re asking for it, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean, me? It was her idea.”

  “If I was in your ugly shoes,” Keo said, then paused. He punched me in the arm. “I’d do it.”

  Waiting the three days for Friday to roll around was maddening. I even cut ûve or ten minutes off my charters. I wanted to be near her, to watch her walk down the beach, or sit pulling water in a canoe tied to shore, or see her sink down into the ocean after a workout and walk up the sand with her shirt stuck to her body.

  When Friday night finally arrived I was as jumpy as a dog that knew he was going hunting. By seven-thirty the sky had darkened and had lost its brilliant sundown reds. I stood in the shadow of a palm tree, away from the burning torches lining the beach and hotel grounds, and studied every human movement for as far as I could see. The pier was quiet, as was the beach in the cove.

  “Hi,” someone said from behind me, nearly sending me out of my skin. Rudy’s girl, wearing thongs, faded jeans with holes in the knees, and a light blue work shirt tied at her waist. Her hair hung over her shoulders looking yellow-silver in the flickering reflection of the torches.

  I’m glad you came,” she said. “I was worried you wouldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Rudy.”

  “Sorry to say this,” I said, “but he’s a jerk if there ever was one.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So your name is Shelley.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Rudy called you from the beach.”

  “And you’re Sonny Mendoza,” she said, smiling in the dim light. “I’ve been asking around.”

  I glanced over her shoulder. The top of a car crept toward the pier on the other side of the seawall. “Let’s get out of here. Makes me nervous, fooling around with Rudy’s girl.”

  She dropped her smile. “I’m not Rudy’s girl, or anyone’s girl.”

  “Tell Rudy that.”

  She frowned. “Come on. This makes me nervous, too.”

  We walked quickly around the cove and out toward the rocky point across from the end of the pier. We picked our way through the bushes and sat out on the round boulders, just a foot or two above the splash of waves. I could smell her perfume, she was so close.

  I picked pebbles from between the boulders and threw them out into the black water. But Shelley wasn’t so shy about talking.

  She was from Chicago. Her parents had some buildings there and had made a lot of money, so they decided to move to the islands and retire early. Her father had a small plane and was thinking about starting an air-taxi business, taking people and cargo back and forth to Honolulu. Shelley was seventeen. My outlook for the future soared when it hit me that we’d be spending our senior year together.

  I finally got up some nerve. “Why do you hang around with a guy like Rudy?”

  “He’s the first güy I met here,” she said. “He was sitting with Jimmy and Lenny on the hood of Lenny’s car in the school parking lot.”

  I nodded.

  “Rudy scares me,” she went on. “I don’t know how to get away from him. He thinks he owns me.”

  I threw another pebble. “He thinks he owns the whole island. I’ve managed to keep clear of him—until now, anyway.”

  Shelley was quiet a moment, her face barely visible in the light from the pier. “I’m sorry, Sonny. It’s my fault. Back when I first saw you at school, I asked Rudy who you were. He wouldn’t tell me. I didn’t know it would set him off like that.”

  “Aw, that’s all right. If it wasn’t me it would have been someone else.”

  A car pulled out onto the end of the pier. Its headlights shot out over the bay, then flooded the rocks.

  “Duck,” I whispered. We hunkered down into the crevices between the larger boulders as everything around us lit up, Three people got out of the car and stood talking in front of the headlights, shadows flickering over us as they moved. They got back into the car and slowly circled around before leaving the pier.

  “Ten bucks that was Rudy,” I said. “We’d better get out of here. Let’s sneak into Thurston’s place, there, over the rock wall. It’s private property, but they’re not always around.”

  We climbed the wall and peered down into the estate. The house on the grounds was small. The man-made harbor was solid black and quiet. It circled around in front of the unlit house, then opened intoa larger lagoon beyond.

  “Someone could be sitting on the porch, in the shadows,” I whispered. “There’s probably no one there, but I can’t tell for sure. We better go somewhere else.”

  Shelley touched my arm. “Let’s swim in,” she said. “Into the harbor.”

  I looked at her to see if she was joking. She wasn’t. Sure. It was a great idea. We could swim past the house, climb up into the grounds from the harbor, and sneak on out to the beach on the far side of the estate. We’d be completely alone there.

  Shelley climbed back down to the boulders below. By the time I caught up with her she’d untied the tails of her shirt and let them hang to her knees. She kicked her thongs away and took her jeans off, then stuck them under a stone. Her shirt looked like a short dress.

  “Come on,” she said, crouching on a large, flat rock and inching her way down into the water.

  My God, she took off her jeans! A scorpion couldn’t have gotten more attention out of me. She pushed off into the ocean, its blackness swallowing her.

  I left my shorts on, but slipped my T-shirt off and stuck it under the stone with her jeans.

  The ocean was warm. We swam slowly, searching the high sides of the entrance for movement. The water in Thurston’s Harbor was still and much colder than the open sea. Fresh water springs bubbled up under us and spread outward on the surface. Shelley swam close to me, our arms bumping, her breathing quick.

  She followed me to a rock stairway that climbed up out of the water onto a series of terraces that rose from the lagoon. Soundlessly we made our way to a grassy area bound by a low rock wall lined with palm trees. And beyond, the ocean.

  We dropped over the wall and lay on our backs in the sand. A zillion stars spread over us, the Milky Way trailing from one horizon to the other, a wispy white mist.

  “You know, Sonny,” Shelley said. “For the first time since I came to Kona I feel as if I could close my eyes and not have to worry about a thing. I hardly even know you, but it doesn’t seem to matter. I even felt it before I knew who you were, when I first saw you at school. How come?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I said, “I’m having a hard enough time just keeping up with you.”

  And I was. It was impossible for me to think of anything else but her.

  From there it got worse.

  The next three weeks went by as if I lived in a dream. It didn’t even feel like the same world, let alone the same village. Everything I did had some part of Shelley tied into it.

  Whenever we could manage it, we met at night and swam into Thurston’s Harbor. We spent hours lying side by side on the sand, holding hands and staring up at the stars. When the full moon came, the night sky seemed to explode, a brilliant, silvery-gray illumination as deep as the relentless, almost painful feelings that drove me. We spent hours wrapped around each other, kissing, as if kissing were the sweetest of life’s gifts.

  Once, Shelley turned on her side and rested her head on my shoulder, her damp hair pressing up against my cheek. I ran my fingertips over the smooth skin of her face, and a pure, euphoric feeling raced through me. The life I’d lived until then seemed so far away, faint as a whisper, insignificant. At home I looked at Dad and wondered if it had been that way for him, if my mother had whispered in his ear. I wondered if he’d really known her the way I knew Shelley.

  Every night Shelley asked me what it was that made her want to be with me at every hour of every day. And always I felt a knot clumping up in my throat and answered with a shrug. We talked of spending our last year in high school to
gether, then maybe going to college in Honolulu, or getting jobs in the village.

  Dad couldn’t help but notice that I was spending so much time out at night. One afternoon at the pier I said, “See that blond girl over there under the coconut trees?”

  Dad squinted across the cove. Shelley was sitting with Rudy and two other guys. None of them noticed us. Dad nodded.

  “That’s Shelley … my girlfriend.”

  “Then what’s she doing with those guys?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Dad raised an eyebrow, then gave me his entire lesson on sex education. “Watch out you don’t knock anyone up,” he said. Then he smiled and walked over to his Jeep.

  Rudy had been watching me lately. And though Shelley had been nearly invisible in getting to the cove on the nights we met, both of us felt the constant threat of being surprised. Shelley still sat on the beach with Rudy, because she was afraid of what he might do if he ever found out that we’d been together. He’d asked her a hundred times to go places with him and his friends, in Lenny’s primer-gray, low-riding Chevy, but she’d always refused, telling him her father didn’t allow her to date.

  Nothing in my life had ever had made my stomach roll as much as seeing the two of them sitting together under the palms when I came in from a charter.

  One moonless night when Shelley and I were on the beach out at Thurston’s, we heard voices coming from the blackness behind us in the palm trees. Shelley dug down into the sand, trying to disappear.

  I turned over slowly onto my stomach and looked toward the trees. “Don’t move,” I whispered. We were close enough to an outcropping of lava that our bodies, held perfectly still, could be taken for part of the rocky shoreline.

  There was no mistaking the sound of Rudy’s voice. “They out here somewhere—I going kill the fahkah.”

  “How you know dat, brah? Maybe was someone else you saw.”

  “Was dem, I tell you.”

  Shelley dug her fingers into my arm and tried to inch closer to the rocks. But we had to lie still.

  A cigarette glowed bright orange, then shot out over the wall, flipping sparks as it twirled toward the ocean. Behind us waves rolled in a continuous rush over the jagged rocks and into the tidal pools just inches beyond our feet.

  One of the shadows dropped down to the sand. I had to fight the urge to grab Shelley and run for it. We could make it, I thought. We could hide. With a decent head start we could make it.

  The shadow walked around on the sand, then started back up toward the wall. Then he stopped and seemed to be staring at the spot where we lay. He took a step closer and bent forward.

  “Get ready to run for it,” I whispered. “One more step and he’ll see us.”

  But then the shadow turned away and went back to the wall. The four shapes moved together and spoke in a low murmur, then separated, spreading out along the length of the wall above us, blocking any chance of a run for the trees.

  “They know we’re here,” I whispered to Shelley. “They’ve blocked us off. We can let them get us, or we can swim.”

  Shelley’s body shook, pressing up against me. “Follow me as closely as you can,” I said. “It’s not going to be easy getting over the rocks.

  “Now!”

  I pulled her by the hand. Tidal pools were everywhere, knee-deep and covered with submerged hooks and knives of rock and coral. Sometimes we had to crawl, feeling our way into the blackness. The only consolation was in knowing that Rudy had to face the same problem.

  They shouted behind us. “There! There! They heading for the water! Get ‘urn!”

  My feet were tough, but Shelley cried as she stumbled over the sharp lava. By the time we finally reached the ocean, her sobs quivered out in frantic whimpers, more from fear than pain.

  As we swam away, I looked back. Like hunters tracking a pig, the four shadows moved along the rocks. We couldn’t have been more than two nearly invisible dots among a million black and gray flickers of moving ocean. Finally they gave up and disappeared into the trees.

  We swam in past the pier and across the harbor, so we could get out of the water at the cove in front of the palace. Rudy would probably be hanging around the pier watching for us.

  When we finally dragged ourselves out of the water, barely having the strength to crawl, Shelley sat close to me, shivering on the sand.

  “Let’s get up into the trees,” she said, too scared and too tired to push her tangled wet hair out of her face. “He knows it was us.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I’m afraid, Sonny. Rudy gets crazy. I just want to get away, but I can’t. And now I’ve got you dragged into it.”

  “I dragged myself in. Stop worrying, we’ll think of something.”

  I wondered just what in the world I had in mind to do. I didn’t have the guts to tell Shelley that I was just as scared of Rudy and his gang as she was. He might slap her around a little, but I didn’t think he’d lose any sleep over slitting my belly with a switchblade, with an extra slice for what Keo had done to him at school.

  We walked along the road out of town to Shelley’s house, ducking into the bushes whenever a car approached. Shelley limped most of the way, her feet cut up pretty badly. I tied palm fronds around them to ease the pain.

  When we finally got there she stood with her arms around my neck and hugged me a long time, hanging on as if it would be the last time we’d ever see each other. I closed my eyes and slid helplessly into the blissful trance of closeness.

  A light went off in her house. I pulled away. I hadn’t even met her parents yet. They’d always been asleep by the time we’d walked home. I didn’t want them to see Shelley with cut feet and tangled hair and wonder what I did to her. And worse, her jeans were still stuck under a rock at the cove.

  “Be careful,” Shelley whispered as I moved away into the darkness. “I’d die if anything happened to you.”

  I walked the mile more down the coast to my house, the dream of Shelley flickering, a slow-building dread gnawing at me.

  The dogs trotted out to me. I knelt down and scratched their ears and let them lick my face. The light from the kitchen window flickered in their eyes.

  When I stood, they spread out and returned to their sleeping spots, one of them leading me up the steps to the porch. Popoki sat at the top. She pretty much ran the place. She stood and stretched when I whispered her name.

  Dad was sitting at the kitchen table with a small pile of papers and his checkbook, a cup of coffee steaming near his right hand. His wavy hair curled around his ears. Streaks of gray were beginning to mar the deep brown above his forehead.

  In his thick, callused fingers the thin ballpoint pen looked out of place.

  I sat down across from him, still damp and itching from the drying salt.

  Dad leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “You’ve been pretty busy lately,” he said.

  I nodded, and said, “Busy’s too slow a word.”

  He smiled. “What’s going on?”

  I hadn’t realized how much I’d been keeping to myself since I’d met Shelley. It all started pouring out. I told him about the paddlers and Rudy and Shelley, then what had happened down at Thurston’s. “It’s like I’m going crazy or something. She’s all I can think of anymore. But Rudy. What do I do about him?”

  Dad sat back, thinking, staring at the table.

  “I wish my mother were here,” I said, then suddenly realized what I’d said.

  Dad looked up.

  “ … I mean … maybe she would have understood about Shelley and Rudy.”

  Dad stared at his hands, playing with the pen. He always seemed to know about people like Rudy, about how they think, and how to deal with them. But Shelley. Could he even guess at what she might be feeling?

  “She probably would have,” he finally said. “She was like your Aunty Pearl. She had a big heart.”

  Dad frowned. “Do you think this girl has been leading Rudy on, and maybe you?” />
  “No,” I said, his words cutting me. “She’s not like that. She’s new here and just got mixed up with him because she didn’t know anyone, that’s all.”

  Dad stared at me. “It seems pretty clear to me, son. You can live in fear of this boy or meet him face to face. If you want to be with her, there’s not much else you can do.”

  “I know,” I said. I knew it the minute I started liking Shelley.

  I went outside and took off my clothes. The dogs sat watching while I hosed the salt off my body. The night air was warm, and the rubbery taste of hose-water gave me a moment of peace. I was at home, with Dad and the dogs, and Popoki the queen, safe, for the moment, from even my own mind.

  The next day when I came in with the glass-bottom boat, a crew of boy paddlers stood waist-deep in the water by a canoe. Rudy lounged under the trees, his arm hanging loosely around Shelley’s neck. As the cat glided up to the sand, Shelley glanced down at me, but quickly turned away. Her knees were drawn up to her chin, and her arms wrapped around her legs.

  “Eh! Shee-shee pants,” Rudy called to me.

  I ignored him and started cleaning up the boat.

  “Eh, I talking to you.” He jumped to his feet along with two of his friends.

  A wave of fear ran through me.

  On the other side of the cove Dad was just sitting down on the wood rail that ran along the edge of the pier. He must have cut his fishing day short. He peered down into the water, as if watching for crabs. He never looked directly at me, but I knew why he was there.

  I turned toward Rudy, but ignored him. “Shelley,” I said.

  Her mouth opened slightly, as if she thought I’d gone clean out of my head. Then her eyes dropped.

  Rudy stepped between us, blocking her from view. The muscles in his jaw rippled as he glared at me.

  I walked closer, starting around Rudy, and reached out my hand. “Shelley, come with me.”

  Rudy slammed his hands against my chest, pushing me backward toward the cat. His two friends moved to each side of me, just out of reach.