Garden of Sugar and Pineapples

by Sam Tabalno

wake—a trick that was even more thrilling at night, like an instant fireworks display. Occasionally, I switched the ignition off and on to trigger backfires, adding to the excitement for onlookers. Of course, we always made sure the coast was clear of any police squad cars, knowing that if we were caught, we’d be cited for exhibition of speed and have to pay a hefty ticket.

  I rode that bike all through my high school years and looked forward to the weekends, when Mando and I went on cruises around the island. We couldn’t go as often as we would have liked, because we both had part-time jobs, and I had two: at Hertz Rent-a-Car and Kauai Surf Hotel at Kalapaki Beach, where I worked as a busboy.

  “Mando, I met dis new guy dis morning,” I said one day. “His name is Randy. He just moved heya from Honolulu and is living wit’ his uncle in Koloa Sugar Mill Camp. He is in my agriculture class, and I going meet him. You like wait and meet him?”

  The dismissal bell had rung ten minutes earlier, and the parking lot was still full of students waiting for rides or boarding busses. Our bikes were parked in a small, reserved space next to the bus stops.

  “No, I no can wait, but it’s cool, S’mael. I have to get home early this afternoon, but why don’t you both come over to the house? I have to help my dad at the church for about an hour, but then I can hang out.”

  “Okay, surwa. Oh, by da way, since tomorrow is Friday, you like go camping dis weekend?” I kick-started my bike and it roared in response, drawing a lot of attention from the other students.

  “What you said?” Mando shouted while he mounted his own bike.

  “I talk to you layta!” I shouted back, letting my bike idle.

  Mando stood up on his kick-lever with his right foot and dropped all of his weight sharply downward, jolting the bike to life. Within a few seconds, he was speeding away down the hill, toward Kalapaki, with an audience of students watching him disappear around the bend a quarter-mile away.

  I spotted Randy and waved him over. “How’s it going, Randy? Mando already went home. Jump on. We go ova to his place.”

  “Okay, cool,” Randy said, then climbed on the back seat.

  I depressed the clutch with my left hand and downshifted with my left foot to first gear. The bike was still on its kickstand. “You ready?” I asked.

  Randy reached both his arms around my waist.

  “What the…? Hey, you freaking homo, lean on the sissy bars and hold on to the sides of the seat. Don’t hold me! Only chicks do dat,” I shouted over the roar of the engine.

  Randy began laughing almost uncontrollably.

  I was laughing too, and turned around to look at him. “You neva ride on a bike befo’?”

  “Heck no! Neva!”

  “Oh. Well, just hold on den!” I slowly released my firm grip from the clutch, and we propelled forward, onto the road, and rounded the corner down the hill from the school.

  It didn’t take long for Mando, Randy, and I to become good friends. Randy was an easygoing, happy-go-lucky kind of guy agreeable to almost anything we suggested, whether it was normal or completely off the wall. Mando was more serious, but that only made him an easy target for Randy’s crazy antics. I was just amused to watch the two of them fart around with each other.

  When we did have a chance to hang out on the weekends, we went camping or fishing all over the island, but our favorite’s beaches were near our home, on the south side of Kauai. We sometimes asked tourist girls to accompany us, when we could find some who were up for an adventure with the locals. The 1960s were a time off abundance in many ways and in many things, and we regularly caught ample amounts of fresh fish and huge lobsters to barbecue on the beach. Time and again, we harvested so much from the sea that we had extras to sell or give to neighbors and friends. My parents were happy to share our bounty with others, because our refrigerator at that time was just a small icebox that couldn’t hold much.

  Our other friend, Wilson, sometimes joined us on campouts or the more challenging nighttime spear-fishing. Wilson was Trudeau’s younger brother, but he liked hanging out with us because being around Randy and Mando meant guaranteed laughs.

  One day, Randy came running out of the water onto the beach where Wilson and I were stoking a fire to life, and he was laughing his head off. “Hey, Wilson, S’mael, look at…” He trailed off, laughing so hard that he was literally bent over. “Look! Look at Mando!”

  We turned and looked, only to see Mando exiting the water and walking backward on the sand with his fins, mask and snorkel still on. He spat out the snorkel mouthpiece and turned around, looking at us with a confused expression on his face, without a clue as to why Randy was laughing his ass off.

  “Look at da thing! Da…th-thing!” Randy was so hysterical he could hardly get the words out.

  When we finally spotted the motivation behind his laughter, Wilson and I looked at each other and burst out into our own rounds of laughter. Mando was standing there, with his swim fins still on and his mask pressed firmly against his face. His unusually large nose was smashed against the inside of his mask, which was half-full of snot. Distorted as it was, his large nose looked like a small fish stuck inside his facemask. By then, Randy, Wilson, and I were rolling on the sand, laughing and holding our stomachs.

  “Get one fish in yo mask, Mando!” Randy yelled, laughing louder. “One fish stay stuck in your mask!”

  “Forget you guys, man.”

  Mando dived back into the water, rinsed his mask out, and blew the snot out of his nose. At first, he’d been embarrassed and frustrated by Randy’s nickname for his sizeable schnoz, “the thing,” but the name had stuck, and whenever anyone mentioned it, we’d all crack up laughing, especially after a few drinks or puffs of weed. Mando had become relatively immune to Randy’s repeated digs about the thing, and even he was able to laugh about his prominent nose. We all had a great time together, even if the laughs came at the expense of one of us.

  A new school week had begun, and I sat gazing out the windows of history class, looking at the Nawilliwilli Harbor. The lush green and brown mountain range ran down to unexpected cliffs. The deep blue ocean waves roared and slammed the jagged cliff walls with towering splashes of white spray. The small stretch of Kalapaki Beach and the safe harbor haven beckoned to me. So, during lunch hour, I ran into Mando and asked, “Hey, Mando, you like go swimming?”

  “I tink Randy stay stuck in his English class, so just you and me.”

  “Oh! Da poor guy’s trying to learn adjerk-tives, predicates, propositions, and all dat junk.”

  “Yeah. We can preposition and catch up with him later.” I laughed. “Let’s take the bikes and roll down the hill so nobody hear us.”

  “Good idea, S’mael.”

  I had no interest in sitting idly in a classroom when adventure was calling my name. For me, last year of Kauai High School was very boring indeed, and I was on a quest for bigger, better, more enticing and stimulating things. Therefore, with mischief flowing through my blood, I did everything I could to make the mind-numbing, mundane routine of school more exhilarating. I skipped the most boring classes as often as I could and went to the beach. Of course, Mando was with me all the way.

  We started our motorcycles once we were past the first bend of the hill that led to Kalapaki Beach and Nawilliwilli Harbor. We parked under a large banyan tree for shade.

  “S’mael, let’s borrow one of da small boats ova there. Just for fun, let’s row out to da breakers.” Mando pointed at the mouth of the bay.

  “What!? You crazy? Dat’s nuts? Dat’s long ways out toward da breakers. The owner no going like it too kindly if we going use his boat to fool around,” I cautioned Mando.

  “Heck, I know, but he’s probably not going to find out unless we break something or sink it…or somebody reports us.”

  After a few minutes of quiet pondering, we both undressed down to our swimming shorts, which we always wore under our school clothes. We locked our clothes and IDs in our seat compartments and nodded at each other;
words were no longer necessary once we made a mutual decision to take part in some crazy activity. Mando took off jogging to the shore, and I had to hop, jump, and leap just to keep up with his long-legged stride.

  We rowed the seven-foot dinghy we’d decided to borrow out into the calm bay. Everything went well for a while as we leaned back, soaked up the sun, and enjoyed the solace of the voyage. After a short time, though, the sun was blanketed by a bank of clouds, and a little breeze summoned goose bumps to the surface of my skin.

  We were out in the middle of the bay, and Mando was rowing us farther and farther away from the shore, closer and closer to the mouth of the bay, where the water was much rougher. I looked over his shoulder at the shore as we bobbed up and down on the growing swells and waves. Then I squinted a little, trying to make out the blur on the shore that looked an awful lot like a small crowd of people near the place where we had taken the boat. “Mando?” I asked.

  “Huh?” he said, clearly distracted.

  The little waves were becoming bigger, a bit too big for our impromptu joy ride, and Mando was busy trying to maneuver the little boat against the onslaught.

  “I tink maybe we should turn dis thing around, Mando.”

  “I’m trying to!” he said, looking at me with worry all over his face.

  The swells began spilling into the little dinghy, and we were taking on water quickly.

  “Mando, I no