Michener, James

by Hawaii

  Now as Kelly stood watching the departing parade, he held in his right hand the slim, well-manicured fingers of a Tulsa divorcee who had come to Honolulu from Reno, seeking emotional re-orientation after her difficult divorce. At the ranch where she had stayed in Nevada a fellow divorcee had told her, "Renniel If you go to Hawaii be sure to look up Kelly Kanakoa. He's adorable." So as soon as Rennde had disembarked from the H & H flagship, Mauna Loa, she had called the number her friend had given her, announcing: "Hello, Kelly? Maud Clemmens told me to look you up."

  He had come sauntering around to the luxurious H & H hotel, the Lagoon, wearing very tight blue pants, a white busboy's jacket with only one button closed, sandals, a yachting cap, and a flower behind his ear. When she came down into the grandiose lobby, crisp and white in a new bathing suit edged in lace, he appraised her

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  insolently and calculated: "This wahine's gonna screw the first night."

  In his job as beachboy, which he had acquired by accident because he liked to surf and had a pleasant joking way with rich women customers, he had become expert in estimating how long it would take him to get into bed with any newcomer. Divorcees, he had found, were easiest because they had undergone great shock to their womanliness and were determined to prove that they, at least, had not been at fault in the breakup of their marriages. It rarely took Kelly more than two nights. Of course when they first met him they certainly had no intention of sleeping with him, but as he explained to the other fellows hanging around the beach, "S'pose da wahine not ride a surfboard yet, how she know what she really wanna do?" It was his job, and he got paid for it, to take divorcees and young widows on surfboards.

  Ten minutes after Rennie met Kelly she was on her first surfing expedition, far out on the reef where the big waves were forming. She was excited by the exhilarating motion of the sea and felt that she would never be able to rise and stand on the board as it swept her toward shore, but when she felt Kelly's strong arms enveloping her from the rear she felt assured, and as the board gathered momentum she allowed herself to be pulled upright, always in Kelly's stout arms, until she stood daringly on the flying board. For a moment the spray blinded her, but she soon learned to tilt her chin high into the wind and break its force, so that soon she was roaring across the reef, with a thundering surf at her feet and the powerful shape of Diamond Head dominating the shore.

  "How marvelous!" she cried as the comber maintained its rush toward the shore. Instinctively she drew Kelly's arm closer about her, pressed backward against him and reveled in his manliness. Then, when the crashing surf broke at last, she felt the board collapse into the dying waves, and she with it, until she was underwater with Kelly's arms still about her, and of her own accord she turned her face to his, and they kissed for a long time under the sea, then idly rose to the surface.

  Now she climbed back upon the surfboard, and with Kelly instructing, started the long paddle out to catch the next wave, but when their board was well separated from the others, she relaxed backwards until she felt herself against the beachboy once more, and there she rested in his secure arms, paddling idly as his adept hands began their explorations beneath her new bathing suit. Sighing, she whispered, "Is this part of the standard instruction?"

  "Not many wahine cute like you," Kelly replied gallantly, whereupon she shivered with joy and brought her body closer to his, where she could feel the muscles of his chest against her neck .

  It was a long, exciting trip out to where the waves formed, and as they waited for the right one, Kelly asked, "You scared stand up dis time?"

  "I'm game to try anything with you," Rennie said, and she showed

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  remarkable aptitude on the long surge in, and when the surfboard finally subsided into the broken wave, and when they were underseas for a kiss, she found to her surprise that her hands were now inside his swimming suit, clutching passionately, hungrily. When they surfaced, his black hair in his eyes like a satyr's, he laughed and said approvingly, "Bimeby you nurnbah one surfer, get da trophy, Rennie."

  "Do I do things right?" she asked modestly.

  "You very right," he assured her.

  "Shall we catch another wave?" she suggested.

  "Why we not go on up your room?" he asked evenly, keeping his dark eyes directly on her.

  "I think we'd better," she agreed, adding cautiously, "Are you allowed upstairs?"

  "S'pose you forget your lauhala hat on de beach, somebody surely gotta bring it to you," he explained.

  "Is that standard procedure?" Rennie asked coyly.

  "Like mos' stuff," Kelly explained, "surfin's gotta have its own rules."

  "We'll play by the rules," she agreed, squeezing his hand. And when he got to her room, holding the sun hat in his powerful hands, he found that she had already climbed into one of the skimpiest playsuits he had ever seen, and in his years on the beach he had seen quite a few.

  "Hey, seestahl Wedder you wear muumuu or sundress or nuttin', you look beautiful," he said approvingly, and in her natural confusion over her divorce, this was exactly what she wanted to hear, and she dispensed with the customary formalities of such moments and held out her arms to the handsome beachboy.

  "Normally I'd order a Scotch and soda, and we'd talk a while . . . Let's take up where we left off under water."

  Kelly studied her for a long, delicious moment and suggested, "Alia time, dese badin' suit get wet too much." And he slipped his off, and when, he stood before her in rugged, dark-skinned power she thought: "If I had married a man like this there'd have been no trouble."

  Now, as the parade passed down Bishop Street, she was about to leave Hawaii, and she held his hand tightly in the last minutes before boarding the Mouna Loa. For nine days she had lived with Kelly passionately and in complete surrender to his amazing manr liness. Once she told him, "Kelly, you should have seen the pthetic little jerk I was married to. God, what a waste of years." Now she whispered, in the bright sunlight, "If we hurried to the ship, would we have time for one more?"

  "Whassamatta why not?" he asked, and they clambered aboard the big ship and sought out her stateroom, but her intended roommate was already unpacking, a tall, rather good-looking girl in her late twenties. There were several embarrassed moments, after which Rennie whispered to Kelly, "What have I got to lose?"

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  She addressed the girl directly and said, "I'm sorry we haven't met, but would you think me an awful stinker if I borrowed the room for a little while?"

  The tall girl slowly studied Rennie and then Kelly. They were an attractive couple, and she laughed, "A vacation's a vacation. How long you need?"

  "About half an hour," Rennie replied. "They have a band upstairs."

  "And a full orchestra right here," the girl laughed, and before she had climbed to the next deck, Rennie was undressed and in bed.

  Later she confided, "For five days I've been, imagining what it would be like to have you back in New York. How old are you, Kelly?"

  "Twenty-one."

  "Damn. I'm twenty-seven."

  "You no seem twenty-seven yet, not in bed," the beachboy assured her.

  "Am I good in bed?" she pleaded. "Really good."

  "You numbah one wahine."

  "Have you known many girls?"

  "Surfin" is surfin'," he replied.

  "For example, Maud Clemmens? Did you sleep with her?"

  "How you like s'pose nex' week somebody ast me, 'How about Rennie? Dat wahine screw?' "

  "Kelly! Such words!"

  "Da whistle gonna blow, Rennie seestah," he warned her, climbing into his own clothes.

  "I went down to the library, Kelly," she said softly. "And there it was, like you said. This big long book with the names written down by the missionary. It says that your family can be traced back for one hundred and thirty-four generations. It must make you feel proud."

  "Don't make me feel notting," Kelly grunted.<
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  "Why does a Hawaiian have the name Kelly?" she asked, slipping on her stockings.

  "My kanaka name Kelolo, but nobody like say 'em."

  "Kelly's a sweet name," she said approvingly. Then she kissed him and asked, "Why wouldn't you take me to your home?"

  "It's notting," he shrugged.

  "You mean, your ancestors were kings and you have nothing for yourself?"

  "I get guitar, I get surfboard, I get cute wahine like you."

  "It's too damned bad," she said bitterly, kissing him again. "Kelly, you're the best thing in Hawaii." They went on deck and she made a quick sign to her roommate, thanking her. The tall girl kughed and winked. When the whistle blew for the last time, warning the various beachboys who had come down to see their haole wahines

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  off, Rennie asked hesitantly, "If some of my friends decide to come to Hawaii ... girl friends that is . . ." She paused.

  "Sure, I look out for dem," Kelly agreed.

  "You're a darling!" she laughed, kissing him ardently as he pulled away to run down the gangplank. In the departure shed the beaohboy Florsheim�they called him that because sometimes he wore shoes �sidled up and asked, "Kelly blalah, da kine wahine da kine blonde, she good screwin'?"

  "Da bes'," Kelly said firmly, and the two beachoys went amiably back to the Lagoon.

  Once or twice as the year 1946 skipped away, Kelly had fleeting doubts which he shared with Florsheim: "Whassamatta me? Takin' care lotsa wahine, all mixed up. Where it gonna get me?" But such speculation was always stilled by the arrival of some new divorcee or widow, and the run of working it around so that he got into bed with them, while they paid the hotel and restaurant bills, was so great that he invariably came around to Florsheim's philosophy: "Mo bettah we get fun now, while we young." So he maintained the routine: meet the ship, find the girl that someone had cabled about, take her surfing, live with her for eight days, kiss her goodbye on the Moana Loa, get some rest, and then meet the next ship. Sometimes he looked with admiration at Johnny Pupali, forty-nine years old and still giving the wahines what he called "Dr. Pupali's surfboard cure for misery."

  One afternoon he asked Pupali about his surprising energy, and the dean of beachboys explained: "A man got energy for do four t'ings. Eat, work, surf, or make love. But at one time got stuff for only two. For me, surfin' and makin' love."

  "You ever get tired?" Kelly asked.

  "Surfin'? No. I gonna die on an incomin' wave. Wahines? Tell you da trufe, Kelly, sometime for about ten minutes after Moana Loa sail, I don' neveh wanna see da kine wahine no ino', but nex' day wen anudder ship blow anudder whistle, man, I'm strip for action."

  In the lazy weeks between girls, Kelly found real joy in loafing on the beach with Florsheim, a big, sprawling man who wore his own kind of costume: enormous baggy shorts of silk and cotton that looked like underwear and fell two inches below his knees, a tentlike aloha shirt whose ends he tied about his middle, leaving a four-inch expanse of belly, Japanese slippers with a thong between his toes, and a coconut hat with a narrow brim and two long fibers reaching eight inches in the air and flopping over on one side. Florsheim always looked sloppy until he kicked off his clothes and stood forth in skintight bathing trunks, and then he looked like a pagan deity, huge, brown, long hair about his ears and a wreath of fragrant maile encircling his brow. Even the most fastidious mainland women reveled in this transformation and loved to lie on the sand beside him, tracing his rippling muscles with their red fingernails.

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  Kelly preferred Florsheim as a companion' because the huge beach-boy could sing the strange falsetto of the islands, and together they made a girted pair, for Kelly had a fine baritone voice. He was also skilled at slack-key, a system of guitar playing peculiar to Hawaii, in which the strings were specially tuned to produce both plucked melody and strummed chords. Many people thought of Kefl/s slack-key as the voice of the islands, for when he was in good form he gave his music an urgent sweetness that no other possessed. The melodies were swift and tremulous like an island bird, but the chords were slow and sure like the thundering of the surf. When the beachboys had nothing to do, they often called, "Kelly blalah. Play da kine sleek-key like dat." He was their troubadour, but he rarely played for visitors. "I doan' like waste time haole," he growled. "Dey doan' know sleek-key."

  The other pastime that he and Florsheim loved was sakura, a crazy Japanese card game played with little black cards that came in, a wooden box with a picture of cherry blossoms on the cover. Any beachboy was hailed as the day's hero who could scrape together enough money to buy a fresh box of sakura cards, and through the long hot days the gang would sit beneath coconut umbrellas, playing the silly game. No other was allowed, and if a man couldn't play sakura, he couldn't be a beachboy. Of course he must also speak degenerate pidgin, as on the afternoon when Kelly was protesting the price of cube steak at the comer drug store.

  "Me t'ink high too much, da kine pipty cent," he mused.

  "Kelly blalah, wha' da kine da kine you speak?" Florsheim asked idly.

  "Whassamatta you, stoopid? You akamai good too much da kine da kine," Kelly growled, adding with a chopping motion of his right hand, "Da kine chop chop."

  "Oh!" Florsheim sang in a high, descending wail of recognition. "You speak da fane da kine? Right, blalah, price too moch. Pipty cent too bloody takai." And they passed to other equally important topics.

  As Kelly became better acquainted with American girls, he felt sorry for them. Invariably they confided how wretched their lives had been with their haole husbands, how the men were not interested in them and how unsatisfactory sex had been. This latter knowledge always astonished Kelly, for while the girls were with him they could think of little else, and if the world had women who were better at sex than the wahines who came over to Hawaii on the Moana Loa, he concluded they must be real tigers. One day he told Florsheim, "How some wahine gonna be any bettah than da kine wahine we get over heah? What you s'pose da mattah wid dese haole men?"

  In 1947 he got a partial answer, because Florsheim married one of his young divorcees, a girl who had a lot of money and who gave him a Chevrolet convertible, and as long as they stayed in Hawaii things went rather well, but after three months in New York they

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  broke all to hell, and Florsheim came back alone to resume his job on the beach. On a day when there was little doing he expkined to his companions, "Dese wahine da kine, seem like dey two people. Over here on a surfboard dey relax, dey screw like mad, dey don't gi'e a damn. Ova' heah I t'row my wahine in da jalopy and we go okolehau." He steered the imaginary car with his hands. "We have bes' time."

  "Wha' happen?" Kelly asked.

  "I tell you, Kelly blalah," Florsheim drawled. "She take me New York, she no like da way I dress. She no like da kine talk, and. She doan' like one goddam t'ing, I t'ink. Allatime give me hell. No more time to'go bed in de apternoon, when it's de bes'. So bimeby she tell me, 'Florsheim, you gotta go night school learn speak haole no kanaka,' and I tellem, 'Go to hell. I ketchem airplane Hawaii,' and she speak me, "Wha" you gonna use money da fcine?' and I tellem, 'Seven hunnerd dollars I scoop f'um you,' and she speak, "You dirty boa', you filthy mountain pig!' and what I tellem den, I ain't gonna repeat."

  "Da kine wahine turn out like dat?" Johnny Pupali mused. "Well, da's why I tell you boys, 'Screw 'em but doan' marry 'em.'"

  Florsheim reflected: "Seem like dey good wahine ova' heah, but anudder kine back home."

  "You gonna keep da kine Chewy?" Kelly asked. "Yeah," Florsheim said, adding, "I not halp so sorry for dem wahine like I was b'fore."

  The sweet days rolled on and Kelly discovered what the older beachboys already knew: that the best wahines of all were those from the Deep South. They were gentler, kinder, and in memorable ways much more loving. They seemed fascinated by Kelly's dark-brown body, and on three different occasions Kelly stayed for days at a time in one suite or anot
her with some adorable girl from the South, without ever leaving the room and often without dressing from one day to the next. At mealtime he would throw a small towel about his waist, tucking in the ends as if it were a sarong, and the wahine from Montgomery or Atlanta or Birmingham would admire him as he lolled about the davenport. Once such a girl said, "You're awfully close to a nigra, Kelly, and yet you aren't. It's fascinating."

  "Hawaiians hate niggers," Kelly assured her, and she felt better. "How do you make your living?" she asked softly, coming to lie beside him after the food had been pushed away. "S'pose I learn you surfin', I get paid." "You get paid for what you did on that surfboard?" she gasped. "Whassamatta, you no look you bill? Clerk put 'im on dere." "Do you get paid ... for days like this?" 'XDlerk put 'im on. Rules say I'm s'pose teachin' you somethin'." "That you are," she said softly as they lapsed off into another nap. In time the girls he slept with became fused in his memory, for one sent another who sent another, but they always seemed to be

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  the same girl, someone he had first met during the war. But there were a few whom he remembered forever. Once a young widow from Baton Rouge flew into the islands, and when he met her he calculated: "Dis wahine free nights da kine, maybe four." He had underestimated, for in her sorrow the young woman would accept no man, yet when they stood in her cabin aboard the departing Moana Loa she said in a soft southern drawl, "The world is such a goddamned lonely place, Kelly."

  "S'pose you lose da kine man you love, I t'ink maybe so," he said.

  "I never loved Charley," she confessed, blowing her nose. "But he was a decent man, a good human being, and the world is worse off now that he's gone."

  "What you gonna do bimeby?" he asked her, lolling with one arm about the end of the bed.

  "I don't know," she said. "How old are you, Kelly?"

  "I twenty-two, las' week."

  "You have your life ahead of you, Kelly. It should be so exciting. But never kid yourself, Kelly. The world is a very lonely place."