Blue Skin of the Sea (7 page)

“Okay,” I said, but didn’t get it.

“We put a note in every box lunch, the same note.” Keo stood up.

“But everyone else will see it, too,” I said.

“All the better. If he doesn’t eat, all the notes will give everyone a good laugh. We can’t miss.”

We spent two secret hours that night writing sixty notes and folding them into little squares. Each note said:

The next morning we rode with Dad to the pier and volunteered to scrub Uncle Raz’s boat down before the movie people came to go out to the barge. Dad took his sampan out Ashing. Uncle Raz drove his truck over to Kona Inn to pick up the lunches. When he returned we offered to load them onto the boat.

“Okay with me,” he said, “but don’t you think I’m going to let you two ride out to the barge. Too many people already.”

“That’s okay, Uncle,” Keo said. “We just want to help”

Uncle Raz went down into the bilge to check the engines. Keo and I slipped a note under the lid of each box as we removed them from the truck.

“If this doesn’t work,” I said, “we’ll have to let the shark go.”

“It’ll work.”

At five-thirty we were waiting under the fish scale as the movie people returned. Two movie guys came by and said hello to us, and smiled. The old man was in the last boatload to arrive.

We shooed away a handful of small kids that were nearby, not wanting them to obstruct the old man’s line of vision. All he had to do was look up and he’d see us. He got off the boat and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of people. I thought he glanced our way but couldn’t tell for sure. In seconds he was engulfed in a sea of heads. I stood up on my toes, and Keo climbed the fish hoist pole a few feet, then waved his arm.

The boss of the movies came over and broke up the crowd. The old man’s hat moved along the top of the heads, like a sand crab skirting along the beach.

“Hey!” Keo yelled, but no one seemed to hear him. The old man took off his hat and got into the back of a car. He didn’t even look over at us.

The next day Keo and I took Dad’s skiff back to the point. The shark was still alive, but weak. For a moment Keo sat there with the wire cutters in his hand, staring at the cable. The shape of the shark wobbled below the skiff. I felt it, too, the moment of truth, as Uncle Raz would say, the moment you know you’ve won or lost. A hollow slapping sound slipped out from under the hull when Keo leaned over the side to cut him loose.

He clipped the cable quickly and threw it overboard. “Go on, get out of here,” he shouted at the shark.

We waited ten minutes for it to leave the area before diving for the anchor.

“There goes a hundred bucks,” Keo said.

“What would we do with it anyway.”

“Yeah. What.”

We both sat there staring into the water. As much as I wanted to be miles from any shark, I hated to see this one go.

When the old man came in from the barge later that day, he was standing on the stern deck of the
Optimystic
with his hands on his hips, balancing on the moving boat like a deckhand. Keo and I sat on the hood of Uncle Raz’s truck watching everyone on the pier rush over in a clump to catch a glimpse of him.

Two men cleared a space for him to get off the boat. The crowd stepped aside and clapped as he came ashore. He took off his hat and half-waved, then got into the long, black car that waited for him every afternoon. As the car passed, we could see him looking at us through the dark backseat window.

Then the car stopped, and backed up. The old man lowered the window. “You the two who sent me the note? The one in all those lunch boxes?”

We both slid off the truck like ice chips off the side of a cold bottle of beer. “Yeah,” said Keo. “We sent the note. Did you see it?”

“How could I miss it?” The old man shook his head, then laughed, as if remembering something funny.

“We were at the fish scale,” Keo said.

“I know,” he said, throwing a hand
up.
“I saw you there. Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to get a moment to myself?”

Some of the people in the crowd noticed that his car had stopped and started walking toward us.

“Listen,” he said. “I want to see your shark. Meet me right here at six in the morning, then take me to it. Can you do that?”

“We can be here at six, mister, but we can’t show you the shark. We had to let him go or he’d die.”

The old man scratched at his beard, under his chin, and thought for a minute. “Not much we can do now, then, is there? What was it about the shark you wanted me to see?”

Keo’s face brightened. I couldn’t believe his luck. He waved his hands around as he talked, first pointing to the fake sharks in the fenced-in area, then generally out to sea. He went on and on about how everything was too fake, and how sharks turn over on their sides when they bite into something that far out of the water.

The old man studied me, then Keo. He looked tired, more like he should have been sitting on the seawall with a fishing pole than in a big car with bodyguards.

I thought Keo had said too much. But the old man smiled and shook his head. “You any relation to Sturges?” he asked Keo.

“Who?”

“My director.”

Keo shrugged no.

“How about a guy named Hemingway?”

Keo looked confused, but you could tell he was giving it serious consideration.

The old man’s shoulders moved as he put his head down and laughed silently, to himself.

The small crowd of people closed in on us, stopping at the end of the car. The old man looked back at them. He puffed his cheeks up and let the air out slowly. Then he smiled at us. “You boys are okay,” he said, giving us a short salute. “Thanks for the tips, I’ll give what you told me some thought.”

He winked and sat back in the seat. The window went up,
smoothly. The car passed through the gate and turned right. Its black roof, just visible above the top of the seawall, slid back through town toward the hotel.

Two days later Dad, Uncle Raz, and Uncle Harley sat on the end of the pier with Keo and me. Again, the old man was out in the skiff sitting with his elbows on his knees waiting for the sharks. This time the marlin was three-quarters eaten. The other two sat side by side on the pier like two giant canoes.

Uncle Raz waved a beer around as he pointed everything out to us. “This is the part where the sharks finish off the old man’s fish,” he said. “It’s a shame. It was a nice one.”

Dad laughed, but I didn’t think Uncle Raz meant it as a joke.

“Quiet on the set,” a man behind us yelled. The crowd of people hushed down until it was completely silent. Someone coughed. Uncle Raz scowled and turned to see who it was.

“Action!” The sharks jerked a little when they started, but moved smoothly as soon as they had gone a few feet. The old man stood up, this time with a club.

“Come on,
galanos”
he said. “Come in again!”

The sharks headed for the marlin and the old man beat down on the one closest to him.

“Cut!” shouted the voice from the crowd.

“Still looks fake,” Keo said, shaking his head.

“They only use a small part ofthat,” Uncle Raz said. “They mix it in with shots of real sharks.”

The old man sat back down in the skiff. He took off his hat and glanced over at the people on the pier. When he saw Keo and me he waved and smiled. Dad put his hand on my shoulder. Uncle Raz thought the old man was waving at him and waved back.

The boss of the movies puttered out to the old man in a
fiberglass skiff and began talking to him. The two sharks swam backward, back out to sea.

“I saw you boys talking with the old man a couple of days ago,” Uncle Raz said. “You were lucky to be in the right place at the right time. He’s a hard man to get to see, let alone talk to.”

“We had a shark to show him,” Keo said, “but we had to let it go. We wanted to tell him about sharks so he would know what to do in that skiff when they make the movie.”

“And he could see how they turn over when they bite a floating fish,” I added.

“Hah!” Uncle Raz said. “Do you two know how many of those buggers they got on a line out at the barge? He’s been looking at sharks for weeks. He doesn’t need to hear about them from you.”

I looked at Uncle Raz, surprised. Keo just kept on staring at the old man.

The boss came back to the pier.

“Look how fake it looks next time the sharks come in,” Keo said. “If there are sharks out at the barge he must not have seen them.”

“Boy, you crazy,” Uncle Raz said. “That old man is a famous movie star. He knows what he’s doing. What do you think
you
can tell him that he doesn’t already know?”

Keo kept staring out in the direction of the skiff. He was as stubborn as Uncle Raz.

“Quiet on the set.”

As the sharks attacked the old man’s marlin yet once again, I watched him stand against them. His khaki pants were wrinkled and baggy, his shirt torn. The club rose and fell pathetically into the ocean, into the last moments of the hopeless battle. It is now, I thought, that he knows it’s over. He’s tired. The sharks will win. I could still see the cables, and the sharks looked stiff, like rubber pontoons. But this time I hardly
noticed them. The movement of the club, rising and falling over and over and over, held me spellbound, like watching Dad, tense and grimacing, clubbing a shuddering
abi
that refused to die. The old man captured me in a way I couldn’t explain. Some invisible power commanded all of my attention, like the blurry mass rising beneath me from the illusion of a stable ocean floor.

The boss of the movies let the camera run, and the old man kept striking aimlessly at the shapes in the water, until he fell to his knees and mumbled a last few brokenhearted words to the ravaged marlin. The crowd on the pier was dead silent. It was as if everyone had stopped breathing.

“Cut.” The boss’s voice trailed out over the water. The old man rested on his knees in the bottom of the boat. No one said a word.

Except Keo.

“The cables,” he whispered, shaking his head.

The old man came back to the pier in a boat with the boss. The crowd broke up slowly, in whispers and low murmuring.

I walked home, because I wanted to be alone for a while. By the time I finally got there, the sky had turned a dark blue-black. The kitchen light cast its warm yellow out into the yard. Dad was frying hamburger, the smell pouring out the window. Steam rose around him as the frying pan popped and hissed.

Before going into the house, I went out to the rocks and sat on the edge of the island. The glow from the fading sunset left a warm, golden trail over the dark ocean that ended at my feet, as if I were connected to a great, glowing well just beyond the limits of my vision. The steady rush of waves sounded like the drone of Dad’s sampan cruising out to the fishing grounds. The last of the sunset was so brilliant, in a muted sort of way, that I picked up a stone and threw it out to sea. I wondered if
the old man was watching the night fall and tracing the same burning curves that cradled the undersides of clouds just above the horizon. He, too, would be standing at the end of the slowly fading trail of light.

The old man worked off the end of the pier for three more days, but Keo and I stayed up the hill with the dogs, shooting BB guns. Keo had seen enough. The whole thing was a waste of time, he said. The movie would look fake.

And I’d seen enough, too. Enough to know that this time, Keo was dead wrong.

Jack Christensen, the new boy from California, had convinced Keo and the rest of the sixth grade boys that they’d be in a bargeload of trouble when they went to the big school up in the highland jungles and had to deal with the seventh and eighth graders. Keo, being a year ahead of me, was the first to have to face the unknown—the shadowy school ten miles up the mountain, a place that suddenly loomed before us like a long, gray squall moving in from the sea.

Dark as it all seemed, though, it existed only in our minds. There were rumors and distorted facts passed down from older brothers and sisters, but no one really knew. Except Jack. He’d never been to the school and hadn’t known anyone who’d gone there, but still, he knew, because he’d seen it all in Los Angeles. They smoke and drink and fight, he said. They join gangs and carry knives.