Blue Skin of the Sea (8 page)

No one wanted to believe him, but there wasn’t one of us who could ignore him. We’d form our own gang, he told us, and call it the
Black Widows. Any sixth grader who wanted protection could have it. All he had to do was swear to help any other Black Widow who got into trouble—and, Jack added, do whatever he said.

One morning in April I walked into the school yard and found Mrs. Carvalho, the principal, lowering a dead mongoose down the flagpole. Almost all eighty-seven kids in the school were standing around watching her. The mongoose was tied to the halyards by its tail.

Keo, Jack, and four other boys sat watching the whole thing from the steps leading up to the veranda that fronted our L-shaped, four-room school house. Bobby Otani, a fifth grader, sat next to Keo, trying to keep from laughing. But the others, all sixth grade Black Widows, were stone-faced. I went over to join them.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Keo ignored me. Bobby Otani snickered and Keo elbowed him. I sat on the lower step, below Keo. Mrs. Carvalho untied the mongoose and marched toward us, its tail pinched in her handkerchief. The mass of kids stepped aside as she moved through them. “Which one of you did this?” she asked.

I quickly stared down at my feet, realizing how guilty we must have looked, sitting off from everyone like we were. And it surprised me to find myself being accused along with everyone else. The younger kids gathered around Mrs. Carvalho and gazed up at us.

Immediately, the boys behind me said, one after the other, “Not me, Mrs. Carvalho; we didn’t do it; not us.”

Mrs. Carvalho searched our faces with narrowed eyes. “I want
all
of you in my office after school.” She walked up the stairs past us, still holding the mongoose, the entire school following her. Some of the fifth and sixth grade girls smirked as they went by.

When Mrs. Carvalho was out of sight, Bobby Otani burst out laughing. Keo stood, and moved away from him with a disgusted look on his face. Bobby, like me, wanted to be in the Black Widows, but Jack wouldn’t let any fifth graders join unless they proved to him that they wanted it bad enough. Jack was thinking of a test. He’d make us do something we didn’t want to do, something that proved our loyalty.

Now Jack came down the stairs and grabbed Bobby by the shoulder of his shirt. “If you want to die before the sun goes down, just keep it up”

Bobby sobered. “Okay, okay.” Jack’s glare sliced through him, then the rest of us, wild with anger. Bobby pushed at Jack’s hand, still gripping the shirt, but Jack stopped him with another glare. No one said a word. Then Jack went up and slouched across the veranda to the classroom, with the rest of us following in silence.

Keo put his hand out and stopped me. “Jack says the mongoose ^vas a warning. Someone from the high school put it there to remind us who’s boss.” Then Keo sniggered. “Bobby thinks Jack put it there himself.”

“Did he?”

“Who knows?”

Mrs. Lee, the fifth and sixth grade teacher, shook her head as we walked in, then started class as if nothing had happened.

One thing about Jack Christensen was that you could never outdo him. No matter what you told him, he’d seen or done it one better. He knew more, lots more. He came from the mainland, a place the rest of us could barely even imagine. He’d moved to the islands from California just before the school year started. Dad said his mother and stepfather were like a lot of people—they come to the islands thinking life will be easy, then find out that it’s just as full of problems as anywhere else.

We gave Jack the nickname of Jack da Lolo, meaning Jack the Crazy, because he was peculiar-crazy, a real odd duck, as Uncle Raz liked to call him. But Uncle Harley thought Jack was lonely. Keo and I argued against that opinion but Uncle Harley just told us we were too young and too caught up in the boy to see it.

Keo and I liked Jack because he was always surprising us, and we hung around with him just to see what he’d do or say next. He had the power to hold us speechless with the things he told us, like all the stuff about the seventh and eighth graders. And he had the advantage of being taller than anyone else in school, at least two inches taller than me, and one taller than Keo. He never went barefoot to school like the rest of us but always wore black tennis shoes and jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up His hair was usually greased back, with a clump hanging down over his forehead. He was Keo’s age, but seemed older because of his size, and because he knew so much more about the world than we did.

“Just wait till next year,” he told Keo. “You’d better learn to protect yourself because you’re going to get into a lot of fights in the seventh grade.” All Jack’s talk pulled Keo under, like a whirlpool. You could see it on his face, and in his eyes, and in the two vertical scowl lines between his eyebrows.

When school let out Mrs. Carvalho made all seven of us sit along one wall of her office. Everyone had gone home except the teachers. She glared across her desk at us for several minutes before saying anything, looking as if she were trying to determine which one of us had the nerve to run the mongoose up the flagpole.

“I know one of you boys put that mongoose up there,” she finally said. “And I know that you
all
know who it was, because you have that guilty look on your faces.”

We sat there staring at the floor.

“Bobby Otani,” she said. “What do you know about this?” Mrs. Carvalho was pretty smart, going straight to the one most likely to tell her what she wanted to know. But Bobby just shrugged his shoulders.

She asked each of us the same question and got nothing but shrugs, and silence, or a whispered “I don’t know.” Then she made us sit for about twenty minutes while she worked at her desk, as if we weren’t there at all.

Just as I was about to doze off, Mrs. Carvalho stood up. “Okay, boys,” she said. “You can go, but I want you to remember that I’ll be keeping my eyes on you.” As we started to leave, she tipped her head toward Jack and added, “You boys should be setting a better example for our new student.”

A few weeks later, just after midnight on a Saturday night, Jack stole his stepfather’s car and picked up Keo, then Bobby Otani, then me. When Jack had learned that none of us ever
snuck out
at night, he couldn’t believe it. In California
everyone
sneaks out, he said, then told us to be on the road in front of our houses at midnight.

With the dogs all standing around watching me, I climbed out of my bedroom window, just as Jack had told me to do. Dad was asleep in the living room. I could hear his breathing through the wall. I wore shorts and a sweatshirt, though the night air at sea level was still warm.

Jack’s stepfather’s car was a brand new green Oldsmobile four-door that reflected moonlight off its shiny hood as it approached, lights flashing off and on as a signal. The road went black when Jack pulled up and turned off the headlights.

Keo sat in front with Uncle Harley’s twenty-two. Bobby was in the back. He stuck his head out the open window. “Come on, get in,” he said, almost whispering. Keo and Jack kept quiet. I slid in next to Bobby, and Jack turned the car around in our
driveway. I wondered what Dad would say if he found out what I was doing.

“Where we going?” I asked.

“Shoot rats/’Jack said. “At the dump”

“You don’t want to be up at the dump at night without a gun,” Bobby said. “I heard there’s a crazy man living there, but no one has ever seen him. He hides in the day and only roams the dump at night, looking for food. Isn’t that right, Keo?”

“That’s what I heard,” Keo said.

If Keo had heard it, I would have heard it, too, and I hadn’t. Still, it could be true. Who knew what went on up there? The dump was a strange enough place in full daylight. Something was always moving around—birds, rats, wild cats and starved dogs, mongooses. Why not a crazy man?

“Where’d you learn to drive?” I asked Jack.

“It’s easy. The car’s automatic, they’re always automatic. That’s what my stepfather likes. Anyone can drive this thing.”

“He knows you drive it?”

“Sure.”

“Does he know you have it now?”

“Of course not.”

“It’s more fun to steal it,” Keo said, sounding as if he’d known Jack for years.

“It’s not stealing,” Jack said. “I just borrowed it for a while.”

Keo sat like an army guard, holding the twenty-two straight up, butt on the floor, like a flagpole. He glanced out the window on his side of the car as if driving around in the middle of the night were something he did all the time.

I leaned forward with my arms on the back of Keo’s seat, peering into the beams of light exposing the old road up to the dump. We were like a small band of outlaws heading for a crime, the four of us riding silently. Getting caught wasn’t even a passing concern. I felt invincible.

Jack drove slowly into the dump a huge, sloping, rectangular
area carved out of the jungle of trees on the side of the mountain, far enough away from the village so you couldn’t smell it. Carefully he snaked his stepfather’s spotless car around broken glass and watery mud holes. The smell of the dump was different in the cool night air, not sickly like it was in the heat of the day, but sharp and biting.

Just above the dump itself was a flat area wide enough to turn a truck around. The dump flowed downhill in heaps and rolls. Jack parked the car on the edge of the turnaround, facing the downward slope, and turned off the headlights, then the engine. We waited a moment, listening to night noises coming up from the moonlight-gray field of garbage below.

“You got the flashlight?” Jack asked.

Keo flicked it on and sent a beam down to an old refrigerator lying on its side. Then he turned it off and with a length of fishing line strapped it to the barrel of Uncle Harley’s rifle.

“What are you doing that for?” Bobby asked, as excited about being at the dump as a dog in a Jeep

“So we can see what we’re shooting at, what do you think?”

We got out of the car and stood on the edge, looking down into the ghostly mounds, black trees all around, a bright ring of illuminated mist around the moon. Jack took the rifle from Keo and turned on the flashlight. The beam followed the path of his aim, first lighting up a bottle, then a tire. “Pow!” he said, then shut the light off. “Listen.”

Things were alive and moving around below us, noises from the far corners, tin cans tipping over somewhere in the middle. Jack turned the light back on and aimed the rifle around the dump until the beam reflected the glassy eyes of a mongoose, frozen between steps, low to the ground and ratlike. Jack shot. The bullet winged it, and it squealed and flipped around a couple of times, then disappeared into the garbage.

We had to stay up on the dirt part because we were barefoot.

Jack wore his black tennis shoes but didn’t want to go down into the dump alone. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Find a cat. This place is loaded with them.” The beam flopped around in the trees as he handed me the rifle. Keo said he thought he’d seen one over to the left when Jack was running the light around.

“How about a bottle?”

“Don’t be a sissy. Go on, shine the light around.”

I moved the beam slowly over the mounds just below us, maybe the length of eight cars away, and found a mongoose.

“Go ahead,” Jack said. “Take a practice shot.”

It was an easy target, like the coffee cans Keo and I set up in the pastures around his house. The mongoose didn’t squeal when I hit it, just fell into a small hump and didn’t move.

“Good shot!” Keo said.

Jack didn’t say anything. I kept the beam on the dead mongoose, its brown body looking like a pile of mud. I’d never killed an animal before. I felt sick to my stomach. In Kona everyone shot mongooses, even Dad. They were pests, they got into your garbage, into your garage, into your cooled trash fires, and made a racket under your house. Still, I felt like there was a hole in me and all the excitement of the night was quickly draining away.

“Now find a cat,” Jack said. “You want to be in the Black Widows, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Then your test is to shoot a cat.”

“But … ”

“A cat. Shoot one or forget about the Widows.”

We spent an hour or so looking around for cats but only found more mongooses. Even the crazy man wasn’t there, but that didn’t stop Jack from trying to scare us with sudden moves, whispering things like, “What was
that?

Jack drove fast going back down to sea level, jabbering the whole way with Keo. I sat in the backseat hanging on to a grip on the door. Jack bet Keo he could drive through the village without getting caught and slowed when we dropped down toward the pier from Palani Road.

“I’ve got an idea,” Jack said, half turning toward the back seat. “You two want to be Black Widows, right? Well, Sonny can go back up to the dump and shoot the cat. That should prove he wants to be in bad enough. And you, Bobby, can put it in a bag, and hide it in Mrs. Carvalho’s office.”

“What?” Bobby said. “I could get kicked out of school for that.”

“Take it or leave it,” Jack said. Keo kept quiet, as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other whether Bobby or I became Black Widows.

I thought the whole thing was stupid. “Why do
we
have to prove ourselves, and not you?” I asked.

“Because I’m the leader.”

I sat back in the seat trying to figure out how everything had gotten so confusing since Jack had come to the island. Now Keo was a Black Widow, and almost a stranger.

Jack glanced over his shoulder as he drove. “Of anyone in this car, you should be begging to be a Black Widow.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean Begging with a capital B, white boy.”

My forehead tightened, my eyes closed to slits.

White boy?

“White,” Jack went on. “As in you’re gonna get your butt kicked in seventh grade. They don’t like white boys up there.”

Keo was dead silent, staring straight ahead. I wanted him to say something—that Jack didn’t know what he was talking about—but he didn’t.
White boy?
Is that how it was? Is that
how Keo saw me? I was like Keo … wasn’t I? He was darker, but wasn’t I as Hawaiian as he was on the inside?