Blue Skin of the Sea (12 page)

“Get my spear,” he told me, then checked the tied strips of
ulua.
He took the spear and poked the point into the bundled mass of raw fish, then dropped back into the sea.

I was just about to jump in behind him when Honey called to me.

“Sonny. Don’t be too hard on your uncle … It’s not easy to say no to Red.”

I glanced back at her, surprised. She’d never said a
word
to me. I didn’t even know she knew my name.

“But he’s a good man,” she added. “Down inside he’s a good man … ”

I nodded and jumped overboard. He’s okay, I thought. But he’s still bossy.

Red and I sank down and watched Uncle Raz approach the
rim of the well, inching down into it with the
ulua
flesh wafting gently on the point of the spear. The cavern where we’d seen the eel was vacant—no eyes, no ugly head. I cringed, not knowing where it was.

Just then the eel poked its head out of the cave. Uncle Raz jerked back. The eel glared at us, keeping a wary distance, like one of Dad’s hunting dogs growling and fanging a cornered pig. Uncle Raz moved the strips of raw fish closer. The eel followed the spear with its eyes. I could almost hear Uncle Raz’s thoughts:
than right,
puhi,
this is for you. Come get it, sweet meat.

Uncle Raz held himself still, moving only the tip of the spear, slowly in small circles near the head of the eel. The moray watched the
ulua
flesh with chilling concentration. Then, without even a hint of warning, it attacked the meat, furiously sinking its pointed, pin-sized teeth in and ripping it off the spear. He slunk back into his cavern leaving his head out only a few inches, enough to keep an eye on Uncle Raz. More food than he knew what to do with hung from either side of his mouth.

Uncle Raz slowly backed out of the well, and together, the three of us rose to the surface.

Back on the boat, I wondered: what was the purpose in feeding the eel? I watched Uncle Raz work without asking any questions. He seemed pleased with himself.

“What about the coral?” Red said.

“As soon as I get rid of the eel, it’s yours.”

Uncle Raz took a large steel hook from the tackle drawer and tied it to the end of a spool of heavy fishing line. “Greed is going to make this
puhi
sorry,” Uncle Raz said, punctuating each word with a stab of the hook. He smiled at Red and added, “No one’s going back to California empty-handed.”

In that moment Uncle Raz seemed like a kid, delighted with the brilliance of his plan and with the edge his intelligence gave him over the eel. “Time for part two,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The moray was gorging itself on the
ulua.
Uncle Raz crept
down on him with the hook in his hand. The eel’s jaw worked in sideward motions, not seeming to care much about what we were up to.

Uncle Raz brought the hook within inches of its head, and with slow, measured movements, brought it up under the jaw. The eel stopped moving its mouth. Uncle Raz held still until it started chewing again. He’s crazy, I thought. Red made him crazy.

As quickly as the eel had attacked the
ulua
flesh, Uncle Raz jammed the steel hook under its jawbone and backpedaled away as fast as he could.

The instant of puncture brought chaos. Bits of
ulua
drifted away from the writhing, slashing, shaking head. Uncle Raz retreated, running the fishing line through his fingers as he rose to the surface, keeping it taut, pulling the hook deeper into the eel’s jaw.

Back on the boat he wound all the slack line around an empty Coke bottle, and pulled back, increasing the pressure on the eel. “He’s trying to squirm deeper into his cave,” he said. “Get me the gloves.”

He told me to hold the bottle while he put the gloves on. Okay,” he said. “Give me a grip.”

I wrapped some line around his left hand. Then, reaching down over the transom, Uncle Raz took one turn of line around his other hand and leaned backward, pulling with the strength of his back and pressing upward with his legs. The evaporating salt water on his back beaded up and glinted sunlight against his red-brown skin. For the moment I’d forgotten about chopping away the black coral, absorbed in the small war Uncle Raz had started with the moray. There was no way, I thought, that the eel was going to beat this man.

“Put your hand on the line,” he said. I touched it with my fingertips and could feel the eel thrashing on the other end. Red stood behind us with his arms crossed.

“Just his head,” Uncle Raz said. “Most of him is still in the cave. The buggers are strong.”

We waited an hour while Uncle Raz fought with the eel. And though the thrashing had long since stopped, the eel solidly resisted with occasional tugging outbursts. A splotch of blood soaked through the bandage on Uncle Raz’s arm. It was swelling and must have ached, but he ignored it.

Honey watched us for a while, then silently slipped into the ocean to cool off. She climbed aboard less than a minute later. The water-filled top of her two-piece swimsuit slipped down an inch as she climbed over the transom. Red stood next to Uncle Raz with a beer in his hand, scowling at the time we were wasting.

Finally, when the sun was halfway from its peak to the horizon, Uncle Raz gained an inch of line. It woke me from the boredom of waiting, like a singing reel puts the life back into you after long hours trolling for mar lin.

“Hah! Now you feel the pain!” Uncle Raz said, fixing his eyes on the line. “We got him now, Red.
We got
him!”

Uncle Raz’s hands must have been cramping pretty badly, because he kept removing them from the line, one at a time, and opening and closing his fist. One inch gained in an hour didn’t seem to me like much to get so optimistic about.

When another two inches of reluctant line came out of the ocean, Uncle Raz almost giggled. Then, as if the line had been cut, he found himself falling backward, stumbling into the fighting chair.

“He’s out!”

Uncle Raz got back up and took in more line in long, steady pulls, as if he were hypnotized. Red and I, and even Honey, peered over the transom, and from the depths could see the shimmering brown snakelike image rising to the surface.

Uncle Raz let the eel pace back and forth along the back of
the boat until it lulled itself into a sense of safety, until it felt no reason to panic.

“Sonny! The club!” he said, and I handed him the heavy, gray wooden fish mallet. He held it still in one hand, waiting for the right moment. Uncle Raz lifted the line and slowly pulled the eel from the water.

At the precise moment the brain crossed the sharp edge of the gunwale, he beat down on it, over and over, until the eel stopped thrashing. Honey covered her ears with her hands.

When the eel was dead Uncle Raz pulled it into the stern cockpit. “Holey moley!” Six feet of muscle and slimy mucus, nearly as thick as Uncle Raz’s arm.

Even though Uncle Raz was pretty sure it was dead, he kept his feet as far from the eel as he could, and told Red and me to stay back.

But the eel was as lifeless as a hose, almost pitiful. Uncle Raz put it in the fish box.

With the eel gone and the way to the bottom of the hollow clear, Uncle Raz returned for the black coral. Red and I followed him again and looked into the cavern. Everything was calm, as if no battle had ever occurred. The black coral was framed below by the sides of the well.

Within seconds Uncle Raz had removed it from its base without losing a single point on its thousand branches. He rose slowly, delicately carrying the black jewel.

Red ran out of air and rose to the surface, but Uncle Raz and I paused to look back down. Where the black coral had been there was only a small, empty white sand oval. It must have lived there a hundred years. We’d scared the rainbow of fish into the caverns. The well was a bland pit, silent.

Red beat us to the boat and climbed aboard. Uncle Raz carefully handed him the black coral and pulled himself up after it, then reached over the gunwale to give me a hand.

The coral sparkled in the sun. Its branches reached out in every direction, growing more delicate toward the ends, like a leafless tree of obsidian. It nearly filled a third of the stern cockpit. Honey sat up and pulled her knees to her chin.

“Honey,” Red said. “It ain’t no marlin, but it’s something.”

“What is it?” she asked from behind her reflecting sunglasses.

“Black coral. A beaut, ain’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” Honey whispered.

“It’ll look great behind the bar,” Red said.

Honey took off her glasses and looked up at him. Her eyes were so beautiful I could feel it in my stomach, a kind of tingling. She smiled at Red, and he beamed over at Uncle Raz. Just before Honey put her glasses back on she glanced at me, eye to eye, as if she could read my thoughts.

“Sonny,” Uncle Raz commanded. “Put the gear away and throw some water over the deck.”.

The sun was low to the horizon by then and the sky was beginning to close down. As excited as Uncle Raz had been about getting the coral for Red, he was strangely silent on the way back to the harbor. I gazed at the trees and coves and scattered houses along the shoreline as we cruised by. The land rose from black lava washed by white foam, through lush green jungle midlands and on up Hualalai, past the tree line to its purple peak, a huge, magnificent mountain that never failed to free my imagination.

But this time it wasn’t the same. I was staring at the island but my mind was miles away. I felt edgy, thinking about the dream-memories that still surfaced, the same words that kept coming back to me whenever something scared me.
Don’t ever do that again, boy! Never!
I’d heard them somewhere. But where? I felt empty not knowing. I wondered if Uncle Raz was feeling empty, too, thinking about the pit where the black coral
had been. The fish would return, but the well would never look the same again.

Just before we reached the harbor, we passed by the point where the Hilton was going to be. When Uncle Raz caught me watching him staring at the point, he looked away and took us quickly into the harbor.

Red paid Uncle Raz a hundred dollars more than he had to, and tipped me with a twenty dollar bill, the biggest tip I’d gotten that summer. I couldn’t believe it—twenty dollars! A brand new spinning rig came immediately to mind, and maybe a fishing tackle box if there was any money left over. I thanked Red again and again, and shook his hand.

He smiled and patted me on the back. “Lots more where that came from, boy.”

Uncle Raz pulled the stern up next to the pier and followed Red off the boat. I handed Honey’s bag up to Uncle Raz.

Honey put her hand out for me to help her up onto the pier. She paused a moment, holding my hand and taking off her glasses with her other hand. She smiled, then leaned close and kissed my forehead.

Uncle Raz drove Red and Honey off to Kona Inn with the black coral nestled safely into the center of an old truck tire in the bed of the truck.

I dragged the hose out of the stern storage hatch and screwed it into the fresh-water spigot on the pier. Water shot out into the harbor when I turned it on, making bright slapping sounds. I stood barefoot on the warm concrete watching Uncle Raz’s truck drive through the village until it was swallowed up by the trees at the end of the seawall.

“Hey!” a man yelled. “No waste the water. Turn ‘urn off if you’re not going to use it.”

“Sorry,” I said, snapping back. I started washing down the boat, feeling richer than I’d been in a long time.

When Uncle Raz returned, we took the boat out to its mooring without saying much to each other. He moved his arm tenderly, as if it were hurting pretty badly. Just before climbing into the skiff to come back to shore, Uncle Raz said, “We made a lot of money this time, Sonny.”

I nodded and said, “Yeah.”

Uncle Raz started the outboard and swung around toward the pier. The sky had turned red out near the horizon, and a rich, deep metal-blue above the mountain.

The skiff vibrated through me as I leaned over the side, studying the dark, mysterious coral heads and bright turquoise sandy spots as we glided over them. I traced a small circle on my forehead with my fingertips, tranquilized by the hum of the outboard. It was strange, but I missed Honey.

I met Uncle Raz on the pier at six-thirty the next morning to get the boat ready for an eight-o’clock charter. He parked his truck crooked in the parking stall and sat there a minute before getting out. He looked as if he’d just gotten up, a flattened swirl of hair mashed on the side of his head.

When we took the skiff out to get the
Optimystic,
I noticed that his arm wasn’t bandaged. The area around the eel bite was red and swollen, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

Then, when we brought the boat in from the mooring, he banged the hull into the truck-tire fenders alongside the pier, leaving a jagged black scar on the side of the boat.

Dad was gassing up the
Ipo
at the time and had seen the whole thing. He came over and dropped down onto the
Optimystic
to see what was going on.

“Nothing,” Uncle Raz said. “I just have a sore arm, that’s all.”

Dad took one look at the bite and headed straight for Uncle
Raz’s ship-to-shore radio to call Uncle Harley. He told him to get on down and take Uncle Raz to the doctor. The bite was infected. He needed some attention, and probably a tetanus shot.

But it wasn’t Uncle Harley who showed up. It was Tutu
Max.

“Shee, you need to get married,” she said, studying Uncle Raz’s arm. “You need someone to act as your brain. How come you let this get so bad?”

Uncle Raz groaned. “Wha’choo doing here, old lady?”

Tutu Max ignored the question and shook her head. “I getting too old for this. Look at you, all puff up on the arm and you don’t even know it.”

Uncle Raz frowned, and Tutu Max wagged a finger at him.

“Get in the car. We going to the doctor.”

“But … ”

“No buts. Get!”

“Don’t worry,” Dad said, trying to suppress a smile. “Sonny and I will take care of the charter.”

Tutu Max not only carted Uncle Raz up to the doctor, but also took him back to her house and kept him there for two days, and she wouldn’t even let him drink a beer. Dad and Uncle Harley thought it was hilarious.