Rudy grabbed my T-shirt, but I knocked his hand away with my arm. One of his friends circled around and grabbed me from belhind. Rudy raised his fist, but held back when his friend suddenly backed off and tipped his head over toward the pier where Dad stood with his arms crossed, staring over at us.
“You’re dead meat,” he said, then flew at me.
“Rudy stopr Shelley ran toward us. Rudy’s friends grabbed her and held her back.
I fell backward when Rudy slammed into me, landing hard, rolling into the water. He jumped up quickly and sat on my stomach. Water washed over my eyes and into my mouth. He punched at my face in rapid jabs.
I heaved up with my stomach and rolled to the side, throwing him off. He swung as he fell, wildly, and I punched back. I dove at him, getting too close to swing. We wrestled in the water, gasping, each of us trying to drown the other. I must have swallowed a couple of gallons of salt.
I got one more punch in that made his mouth bleed. Then I felt hands on my shoulders. The coach stepped between us.
“Rudy! Get the hell out of here. You ain’t paddlin’ for me today!” The coach glared at him. The rest of the paddlers pressed in, a hundred eyes, waiting.
Rudy scrambled up, a little wobbly. He wiped his hand across his mouth, smearing the blood. I was on my knees trying to catch my breath when I saw him coming and fell to the side. He missed me completely and sprawled into the water. I jumped up with my fists clenched and backed off a couple of steps. The coach reached down and grabbed Rudy from behind, by the hair. Rudy got up on his knees. He whipped his arm back at the coach, thinking it was me. The coach surrounded Rudy’s chest with his other arm and lifted him up. Rudy flailed back, but the coach held him until he stopped swinging.
“Go home and cool off.” He let Rudy go.
“You dead, fahkah, you dead, you dead!” he spit at me, then glared at Shelley and stormed off toward town.
Over at the pier Dad strolled away toward the boats. I bent over with my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.
Rudy’s friends let Shelley go and she ran into the water. She knelt next to me, crying. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s all my fault … ”
“It’s okay … ”I said between the gaps in my breathing. “It’s okay … ”
My face throbbed, and my legs felt weak. Inside, my heart pounded like racing pistons.
Shelley helped me pull the cat up on the sand and stake it down, then bathed my face with fresh water, waiting in silence for me to settle down.
We spent the rest of the afternoon alongside the pier on Dad’s boat, together for the first time in open daylight. The ropes creaked as wide swells passed under the hull, lifting us, then dropping us down gently.
My face stung, but the sun felt as good as it ever had at anytime in my life.
“What happened to you?” Keo asked when I saw him the next day.
“Got in a fight with Rudy.”
“For what?”
“Shelley.”
“I hope it was worth it.”
“I’d do it again if I had to.”
I stayed jittery for the next couple of weeks, thinking Rudy would suddenly appear with two or three of his friends, especially somewhere along the road to my house where there were long stretches of nothing but grass, weeds, and trees.
Free of Rudy, Shelley was a new person. We went everywhere together, and at any time of day. I even met her parents.
“Sonny,” her mother said, pausing, as if wanting to remember my name. “Nice to meet you.” She had some kind of mainland accent. She shook my hand like a man would, with a strong grip, and pulled me into the house before letting go. “You look like you just walked out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs book,” she said.
“Huh?”
“You know, Tarzan.”
I liked her instantly.
Her father was an inch shorter and just as friendly. He had a thick blond mustache. No one I knew had a mustache. Uncle Raz said only pansies had them. But Shelley’s father didn’t seem like a pansy to me.
“You like machines?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Good. Then you’ll like what I’ve got in the garage.”
I glanced at Shelley and she rolled her eyes, then smiled. We followed him out to the garage. Carefully, he pulled away a blue canvas tarp.
“Sweet, huh?”
I stared at the small black Alfa Romeo. It had a wooden dashboard and wooden steering wheel. I’d never seen anything like it.
From then on Shelley’s father picked me up on the road whenever he found me walking home.
Shelley quit paddling, and stayed away from the cove until each practice was over. I tried to schedule my charters so that I’d be out most afternoons.
But before summer was over I ran into Rudy again.
The first time, Shelley and I had just finished putting the glass-bottom boat up for the day and were walking back through town on the island side of the road. We were holding hands and talking. Suddenly Shelley fell silent.
Rudy was slouching against a rock wall with four stone-faced boys, all of them staring at us. I felt the skin on the back of my neck start to crawl. But he said nothing as we hurried by.
The second time I was up the hill at the barber shop sitting on the bench outside with my eyes closed, waiting for Dad. The air was cool at that elevation. It was so quiet I could hear a car coming up the road four or five minutes before it passed by.
“Mendoza,” someone said, standing to the side so the sun streamed into my eyes. It was the first time Rudy and I had ever met alone. He laughed and said, “No worry, baole. I no like fight.
“That makes two of us,” I said, squinting up at him and shielding my eyes from the sun.
Rudy smirked. “The barber, my grandmother’s cousin—the old buk-buk got me working his coffee.”
I studied him. Rudy acting like a normal person? What was he getting at?
He nodded and started to leave. “No move when the old man uses the razor, eh? He getting pretty old.” He laughed and went on down the road.
He seemed like a different person without his gang around. I could almost like him.
As the days rolled on, I could tell by the way Dad treated me that I’d climbed a notch in his eyes. And though Rudy had dragged my summer down, Shelley gave it wings, and light, and sky, and hope for the future. We worked the glass-bottom boat together, me running the boat, and she talking to tourists and leading them down to the cove, then diving for coral and shells, bringing them up under the glass and carefully replacing them for the next group
I did two things the rest of that summer—learned almost all I know about shells, fish, and coral, and fell deeper and deeper and deeper under Shelley’s spell.
Family.
I should have thought of a thousand things to say when Shelley asked me what mine was like. But all I said was, “It’s just me and Dad. We’re on our own, pretty much … ”
That sounded so empty.
We were on the point off Thurston’s Harbor watching the sun go down and talking about the future. Shelley wanted to study hotel management at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. She wanted me to go there, too. Just the two of us, getting jobs and going to school together—living our own lives, like Aunty Pearl and Uncle Harley.
We sat side by side on the sand between the rocks, arms and knees touching. Could I even survive if I didn’t go with her?
Shelley tapped me on my arm and pointed toward the lighthouse on the far point. A boat I’d never seen before was heading in toward the harbor—a yacht. Shelley leaned into my shoulder, and we watched it approach.
As it got closer I could tell by the way it cut the water that it was easily the best-made boat I’d ever seen. A man stood at the wheel in a sunken cockpit, and a woman coiled a length of rope on the bow. The yacht sailed past, toward the harbor, silent as a cat’s ghost. It said Moineau, Papeete, in gold script across its dark wood stern.
“Holey,
moley,” I whispered, then whistled softly.
“Sparrow,” Shelley said. “What a beautiful name.”
“Huh?”
“Sparrow, that’s the name of the boat. Moineau is sparrow in French.”
I nodded, half listening, mesmerized by the yacht’s sharp, clean lines.
Sparrow. Pure, fluid. It fit.
I floated away, daydreaming. I was at the helm, sailing at my own speed to wherever I felt like going, the wheel smooth and steady in my hands. The yacht belonged to me and Shelley. Alone, we were sailing the oceans of the world.
Then, suddenly jolted in my daydream, I thought of Dad’s sampan, only it was a dark, deserted ghost boat—a shadow chugging slowly away. It disappeared under the sharp, blue line that divided the sea from the sky.
Where did that come from?
I closed my eyes and shook the thought away, wiping my sweating hands on my T-shirt.
The Moineau anchored close in, bow to the sea, stern tied to the end of the pier. Shelley and I swam past its clean, white wooden hull on our way out of Thurston’s Harbor. I ran my hand along its side at the waterline, felt its smoothness.
The man and woman worked side by side, furling the sails and stowing gear without speaking, as if they’d been sailing together forever. Neither of them looked much older than twenty or twenty-five. How could they be so young and have a boat like this?
The man stood a moment when he saw us watching him. He nodded, and I lifted my chin. Then he turned away and took a bucket up onto the pier.
We found Keo and Uncle Raz sitting in Uncle Raz’s truck drinking beer, the two of them slouching in their seats with the doors open. When we walked up Uncle Raz waved his bottle toward the Moineau.
“Foo-foo, yeah?”
Keo smirked, then waved past Uncle Raz to Shelley.
“A boat like that,” Uncle Raz went on, “is good for nothing but a tea party.”
I turned and glanced back at the yacht. Uncle Raz never had taken to people who didn’t work for a living, even people like Shelley’s father who’d earned enough to retire while still pretty young. And he’d sooner get caught driving a pink Cadillac convertible than fiddling around on a cocky boat like the Moineau.
“I think it’s kind of … beautiful,” I said.
“Beautiful!” Uncle Raz pinched up his eyes and pulled his head back into his neck, then turned to Keo. “What is he? A fisherman or a macaroni?”
Keo peeked over at me and smiled. “Macaroni. No doubt aboutit.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Shelley asked.
Uncle Raz looked like he’d just licked a lemon. “What can you do with it? Can’t fish. Can’t take a lot of people anywhere. Can’t even say the name. You can go for a boat ride, that’s all.”
Shelley held his gaze and Uncle Raz blinked. He could stare a man down for days, but Tutu Max had beaten him into learning about women a long time ago. He waved his beer toward me and said to Shelley without looking at her, “You go fishing with this boy’s daddy and he’ll show you what a boat is for.”
“Where is he, anyway?” I asked Uncle Raz. “He should have been back an hour ago.”
“Last I heard he was way down past Milolii.”
I squinted into the sunset and scanned the horizon. No boats. Fishermen were funny sometimes—superstitious. And Dad was no different from the rest of them. Taking a female fishing was bad luck, like bananas. I wondered what he’d say about taking Shelley along. He didn’t know her very well. He was nice to her, but he usually just nodded and went on with what he was doing. It didn’t seem to bother Shelley.
“I’ll ask him,” Shelley said.
Uncle Raz smiled. “You not bad, girl. Got a little bit of boy inside you, I can see.”
Shelley stuck her arm through mine and said, “Maybe … maybe.”
Uncle Raz swung his beer again, his favorite pointer. He said to Shelley, “Maybe you can show Sonny some things, eh? Straighten him out about boats.”
I pulled Shelley away. “Come on. It’s embarrassing that I’m related to this babooze.”
The sky had darkened by then, and the Moineatfs night lights stretched off its beam in long, wobbly reflections. For an instant it hit again, that eerie thought—Dad’s boat, a ghost boat, sinking into the horizon.
I strode off quickly, dragging Shelley along behind me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. She stopped and made me look into her eyes. “What?”
“I don’t know. Something doesn’t feel right, that’s all.”
“Well, what does it feel like?”
I looked up into the black sky, my hands on my hips, and took a deep breath. “ … Ghosts,” I said.
Shelley giggled, then stopped. “I’m sorry, Sonny. Really. It just sounded funny the way you said it. What do you mean, ghosts?”
“I don’t know … I guess I’m just worried about Dad. He should have been back by now.”
Shelley wrapped herself around my arm and snuggled up close to me. It was a small gesture. But it melted me down like ice in the sun.
She stared at me a moment, then gave me a nudge. “Come on, you need to get yourself home for some hot soup and a good night’s sleep He’ll show up.”
I waited up most of the night, dozing at times, but fitfully. At five the next morning, I called Uncle Raz’s house, but he didn’t answer. Right after I hung up, the phone rang.
“Uncle Raz just called from the pier,” Keo said. “Your dad’s boat isn’t there. Did he ever come home?”
“No.”
Keo was silent a minute. Then he said, “We’re on our way down to the pier. Start walking. We’ll pick you up on the road.”
I felt my hands sweating again. Where was he? Why didn’t he radio in?
The dogs whined when I turned on the kitchen light, crowding around on the porch by the screen door as if they knew something wasn’t right. I fed them and hurried out to the shadowy road. The sun was still far below the mountain, but the sky was beginning to turn an early-morning pale.
Keo and Uncle Harley picked me up a mile from town, the brightness of the Jeep’s headlights dimming when Uncle Harley took his foot off the gas pedal. I climbed over the spare tire into the backseat.
“Tell me everything you know about where he might have gone yesterday,” Uncle Harley said.
“I don’t know anything,” I said. “He just went out as usual. Where do you think he is?”
“Who knows? But he would have used the radio if he was in trouble.”
“Maybe he ran out of gas.”
“Maybe. But still he would radio.”
No one said anything for a while. I glimpsed the ocean through the trees, gray and calm, the ghostly white of breaking waves flaring up below the palms. What do you know?
Nothing.
It surprised me to think that. And it scared me. I knew nothing about where Dad was. Did I even know much about wbo he was? Our lives went on. That’s all.
When we drove out to the end of the pier, Uncle Raz was just pulling the Optimystic away from its mooring in the harbor, walking the boat in toward us. Dad’s buoy was pale white against the flat sea. The skiff was still tied to it.
Keo and I jumped out of the Jeep and studied the ocean, straining to see a sign down the southern coastline, a light, a dark speck.
Uncle Harley pushed himself up and stood on the seat. He panned the horizon with a pair of binoculars. “Nothing,” he said. “Only a sailboat.”
I turned to where the Moineau had anchored the night before. It was gone.
Uncle Raz parked the boat and walked over. “I’ve been trying to call Raymond for the last hour, but he still doesn’t answer.”
“Or can’t answer,” Uncle Harley said. “What do you think?”
“Keep calling and go look,” Uncle Raz said.
We decided that Keo and I would go with Uncle Raz on the boat, and Uncle Harley would drive down the coast checking the harbors. We’d search until three o’clock. If Dad hadn’t sho
wn up by then, we’d call the Coast Guard.
“Sonny,” Uncle Harley said. “Think hard—did he say anything at all about where he was going yesterday?”
I shook my head.
Uncle Harley pressed his lips together, then said, “Okay, let’s go.”
“Sonny.” Keo nodded down the pier. “Your girlfriend.”
Shelley and her father drove up to us in the Alfa Romeo. Shelley got out.
“Did he come back?”
“No,” I said. “We’re going out to look for him now.”
Shelley turned toward the car. “Daddy … ”
Her father turned off the engine and got out. “Mick Pierce,” he said, sticking his hand out to Uncle Harley, then to Uncle Raz. “Hi, boys,” he said to Keo and me. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. “Shelley told me you were worried about your father.”
Shelley watched me, eyes pinched with concern.
“We’re all worried, Mr. Pierce,” Uncle Harley said. “He didn’t come back to the harbor last night, and we can’t raise him on the radio.”
“Call me Mick,” he said, smiling. “I can help. I’ve got a little single-engine Cessna out at the airport.”
Uncle Harley glanced over at Uncle Raz. Uncle Raz shrugged and said, “He’ll cover a lot more water than I will.”
Uncle Harley thought for a second. Then he looked Mr. Pierce in the eye. “We could use your help, Mick … it could be a wild goose chase, though. There’s a lot of water out there.”
Mr. Pierce nodded, his smile gone.
“You’ll be looking for a blue and orange sampan,” Uncle Harley added. “About thirty feet long. Open deck.”
“I know the boat. Shelley pointed it out to me. I’ll fly north and work my way south. We can keep in touch by radio.” He called for Shelley as he started back to his car.
Shelley looked at Uncle Raz, not following.
“Why not,” Uncle Raz said, cracking his sour expression. “Get on board.”
Mr. Pierce nodded and drove off.
As we sped out of the harbor, the morning sun burst over the mountain, pouring color into the ocean. I stared out to sea with my knees braced against the gunwale. Shelley surrounded me with her arms from behind.
Blue Skin of the Sea Page 18
