Kung Fooey (5 page)

Tito yawned and stretched. He kicked me,
not hard, just enough to get my attention. “Who’s that goofball in your class, wears those black boots? Where he came from?”

“He just moved here from Hilo.”

Tito nodded. “Hilo. Never been there.” He thought a moment. “What’s with those glasses? He like be one cop, or what?”

“He’s weird,” Julio said.

Willy nodded. “Different.”

Tito stared at Willy. “You diff’rent, too, haole boy. You know that, right?”

Willy looked away. He knew that
haole boy
meant
white boy
. “Uh … yeah. I guess.”

“Whatchoo mean, you guess?” Bozo spat. “If Tito say you diff’rent, you diff’rent.”

“Leave him alone,” I snapped.

Bozo popped up. “What?”

Ooops.

Tito raised his hand. “S’okay, Bozo. I got it.”

Bozo sat back down slowly, his cold gaze burning into me.

Frankie Diamond just sat there scratching Streak’s chin, her eyes closed. Happy dog.

Tito looked at me. “So, the boy-cop got a name?”

“Benny Obi.”

Tito nodded. “Can he fight?”

“What?”

“I said, is he a fighter like me or a sissy like you?”

If just for five minutes I could be the Incredible Hulk. Ho, man, would I have some fun.

“He knows kung fu,” I said.

Tito smiled, his teeth bright white in the sun. “Ahhh, kung fu … good, good. Kung fu is good.”

Bozo humphed. “You know kung fu, too, ah, Tito?”

Tito spat on the grass. “I know something better. It’s called I-broke-your-face fu.”

Bozo fell back on the grass laughing.

Tito turned to me again. “We going see whose fu is better, ah?”

“W
eird stuff went on around my house in Hilo,” Benny Obi told us the next day.

Julio, Rubin, Willy, Maya, and I were sitting on the grass at recess, like always. This time, Benny had come, too. He stood looking down on us wearing his shiny police glasses.

We squinted up at him.

“Ghosts or spirits or night marchers or something, I don’t know because I never actually saw them, but for sure they weren’t people, because people couldn’t do what they did without heavy machinery.… I say
they
, but it could have been an
it
 … I don’t know … I mean, how can you tell?”

Huh?

“What are you talking about?” Julio said. “Make sense.”

Benny Obi tapped a finger on his chin. “I wonder if it was an it. Huh. I tell you anyways.… See, we lived outside of town, and all around us was like ranch land with cows and wild pigs and all that, and there was this dirt road by my house that ran up into the country above our place, and one day I woke up and looked out the window and there it was, in the middle of the road, right by my house … a giant boulder.”

He looked at us, letting his words sink in.

“Was
big
, I tell you, too big for one or two
or even five guys to put there, like the size of a refrigerator.” Benny shook his head. “Must have weighed a ton.”

Julio smirked and whispered, “Freaky deaky.”

If Benny heard, he was unfazed. “Maybe a bulldozer could put it there,” he went on. “Or a front-end loader, if it was a big one. But nobody ever heard any heavy machinery like that in the night, so how did that giant rock get there?”

“Obake,”
Rubin said. “Ghosts. Only way.”

Benny pointed at Rubin. “You got it.
Obake.”

Julio looked at Rubin like, Are you serious? You really believe this stuff?

Rubin frowned. “Well, how else would you explain it?”

“So what happened?” Willy asked. “Did you just leave it in the road?”

“My dad got some of his friends. One of them worked for the county, and he drove up a county front-end loader and pushed the boulder to the side of the road. He was real
nervous doing it, too, because he believed it was ghosts who put it there and he didn’t want the ghosts to get mad and come to his house and do something weird.”

Rubin’s eyes got big. “Like what?”

“Like put a skeleton in his kitchen, because he heard
obake
do that sometimes.”

“They do?”

“Yeah, for real, they sit a skeleton in a chair like it’s eating breakfast and then you wake up and find it at your table. Man, that would
freak
 … 
me
 … 
out!
”

Maya yelped out a laugh. Benny looked at her and wagged his finger. “You should show respect for what you don’t know, or else
obake
might come to your house, too.”

“You know what?” Maya said, getting up. “I just remembered I was supposed to hang out with normal people.”

Maya left just as Tito, Bozo, and Frankie Diamond walked by.

“Hey, tough girl,” Tito said. “Last night I saw you in my dream.”

Maya turned to walk backwards. “Yeah? I saw you in my nightmare.”

Frankie Diamond nearly fell over laughing.

Tito grinned. “She pretty quick.”

“Lucky she’s a girl,” Bozo mumbled.

When Tito noticed Benny Obi, he stopped and stared. Seconds ticked by.

I held my breath.

Finally, Tito turned, spat, and walked on.

“Ho,” I whispered.

“I hate when he does that,” Julio said. “You can’t tell if he going jump you, or what.”

Benny Obi went on as if nothing had happened. “Like I was saying, my dad and his friends pushed that boulder off the road
into the weeds, and that night when I tried to sleep I couldn’t because I kept listening for noises outside … but then I fell asleep sometime around three o’clock, and when I woke up the next morning I ran outside to look at the road … and there it was … again!”

He shook his head, then pulled off his dark glasses, cleaned them on his T-shirt, and put them back on.

“Holy moley,” Rubin said.

Benny nodded. “
Obake
. Only answer.”

Willy’s mouth hung open.

I wanted to ask Benny Obi if the boulder was still in the road when he moved away, but I was too spooked. Already I might get nightmares. I heard stories of weird stuff like that all the time. Ledward was full of them. Clarence, too, if you got him going.

Benny looked over to where Tito, Bozo, and Frankie Diamond were sitting in the shade of a monkeypod tree. “Who are those guys?”

“Stay away from them,” I said.

“Why?”

“They’re trouble, that’s why,” Julio said. “That one guy, Tito—the one who stared at you—he could ruin your day, if he wanted.”

Benny studied Tito a moment longer. “I’m not scared of him.”

Willy shivered. “You should be.”

“Really,” I said. “He’s not your friend. He’s mean.”

“Tito knows kung fu, too, I bet,” Julio added.

“So?” Benny said, keeping his eyes on Tito.

Julio shrugged. “Just saying.”

W
hen Darci and I got home after school, we found Clarence in our driveway, washing his car with a fat sponge and a bucket of soapy water. The garden hose gurgled water by his feet.

“How come you’re doing that?” I asked. “It wasn’t even dirty. It’s never dirty.”

“That’s because I keep it clean.” Clarence squirted soap off the hood, then went over and turned off the spigot.

He came back and crouched down to run his finger over a scratch on the front fender. It was so small Darci and I had to move up close to see it. “Did Stella do that?” I asked.

Clarence nodded. “I going fix it now. Like see some magic?”

“Sure,” I said, crouching down next to him. Clarence was big, like Ledward.

Darci shook her head and went into the house.

Clarence gave me a grin. “Man stuff, ah?”

“Man stuff.”

I followed Clarence to the back of the car. He opened the trunk. Inside, it was as clean and neat as Frankie Diamond’s haircut. Not a thing out of place.

Clarence looked in a cardboard box and pulled out a can. He held it up. “Scratch remover.”

“I thought you had to paint over scratches.”

He grabbed a rag from the box. “Only the big ones.”

We crouched around the scratch.

“How did you even see it?” I asked. “It’s so small.”

Clarence chuckled. “I notice everything. Watch this.”

He opened the can, dabbed some of the scratch remover on the rag, and rubbed it across the scratch. We watched the spot turn white in the sun. When it was dry, Clarence rubbed it off.

Poof. The scratch was gone.

“Wow,” I said.

“Someday when you get your own car, keep it clean. Nothing like a clean car. And when you get some kind of problem with it, fix it. Right away. Don’t wait for um to get more worse. Take care of your car and it will treat you right.”

Uh … okay.

Clarence put the scratch remover and the rag back in the trunk. The screen door slapped open and Stella came out of the house.

She glared at me. “What are
you
doing here?”

“I live here.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m talking to Clarence.”

“About what?” She glanced at Clarence, then back at me. “My driving?”

Clarence put up his hands in surrender.

“We weren’t, but we can,” I said. “Where should we start?”