Blue Skin of the Sea (4 page)

The three of them thought for a moment with puzzled faces, Dad standing between his two brothers, an inch or so taller than both of them. Uncle Raz was the shortest, and the youngest, with a slight bulge in his stomach from too much beer. Dad was thin, but muscular, and darker from being out on his boat. Uncle Harley was muscular, too, but not in the sharp, chiseled way Dad was. He was the oldest, and also the softest. He was always cuddling up to Aunty Pearl. The two of them fit together like a tug and a barge.

Uncle Raz stood barefoot in the powdery dirt with his hands in his pockets, jingling change. “Shoot him today, or what?” He sure had a way of getting under your skin sometimes.

“Nope. Tomorrow’s soon enough,” Uncle Harley said in a low voice.

“Hey, don’t get pantie,” Uncle Raz said. “Let’s go have a beer
and figure this out. It’s gonna take some thinking to get Pearl on a scale.”

“Hah,” Uncle Harley said. “If you knew what you’re getting yourself into you’d just pay me and forget the whole thing.” Uncle Harley glanced over at Dad and flicked his eyebrows. Something passed between them that I couldn’t translate. “We can do it, though.”

Keo didn’t seem to be bothered at all, even though Aunty Pearl was his mother.

“Keo,” Uncle Harley said. “Go get three beers.”

Keo took off up to the house and I followed. “A
hundred dollars
,” said as we ran.

“Dad would never bet a hundred dollars unless he knew he could win,” Keo said. “I don’t know
bow,
but he’ll win all right.”

Inside the house Aunty Pearl was sitting at the kitchen table peeling potatoes. She was humming “Akaka Falls,” her voice so soothing it made me stop and listen. Her gold wedding ring was almost lost in the puffy skin that bunched up around it. She’d probably never be able to take it off, even if she wanted to. Though she never mentioned it, I always thought she had royal blood in her. The bigger the Hawaiian queens were, the more beautiful. Keo was lucky that way, because he had the blood, too.

Aunty Pearl smiled at us and pointed toward a wooden bowl full of red-orange mangoes.

“Thanks, Aunty.” I reached for a fat one.

“Dad wants some beer,” Keo said, already opening the icebox.

“So early? It’s not even lunchtime yet. What are those Men-doza boys up to out there anyway?”

“The pig. Dad doesn’t want to kill it.”

“Ahhh,” Aunty Pearl said in a long outward breath. “That’s
what I told him when he brought it home. ‘What you going do with that thing?’ I said. Teed him, get him fat, maybe sell him, or have a luau,’ your daddy said. ‘You think you can give him up after you raise him,’ I said, ‘or worse, shoot him and eat him? You crazy, Harley.’ Your daddy’s too soft, Keo. He’s too good inside to do that. But I guess he has to find out for himself.”

Aunty Pearl thought for a moment. “That Raz and your fathers are just a bunch of boys who don’t want to grow up. But that’s all right, they’re good boys. And I like Daddy just the way he is. If he grew up he’d just get cranky.”

Keo put three cold beers on the table and picked out a mango for himself. A chicken clucked outside the open kitchen window. Sweat came out of Aunty Pearl’s hair and trailed down her temples. “Sonny,” she said. “Put some food in the tank, just a couple of pinches.”

Aunty Pearl’s thirty-gallon aquarium sat on the counter behind me, the pump vibrating through the glass sides. Uncle Harley had built it for her when it became too hard for Aunty Pearl to go down to the pier every day like she and Uncle Harley had done for years. As time had passed, she’d gotten bigger and bigger, and moving around had almost become too much for her. Now she mostly stayed home with her goldfish and swordtails, instead of watching the boats come in.

Keo stuck a bottle of beer in the back pocket of his shorts and grabbed the other two in one hand. We walked out of the kitchen leaving Aunty Pearl shaking her head. “Don’t worry, boys,” she called after us. “I know that man. He’s soft.”

Outside, Dad and his two brothers were leaning up against the Jeep and Uncle Raz’s shiny red Toyota pickup Uncle Raz was laughing at something Uncle Harley had said. “This I gotta see,” he said. “This I gotta see.”

I glanced at Keo. He shrugged his shoulders.

Dad said, “I always thought you were a little off, Harley. Making ice, selling fish, and raising a pig doesn’t give your
brain any exercise. Maybe you better take up something that makes you sweat a little.”

Keo handed them the beer. We hung around hoping they’d give us a clue as to what was going on.

“Tonight,” Uncle Harley said.

A fly buzzed near my ear and I brushed it away.

Dad, Uncle Raz, and I drove back up later, squeezed together in the front seat of the Toyota. Uncle Harley and Aunty Pearl were sitting on the porch watching the sunset and Keo was in the yard shooting at a saki bottle with his BB gun. Bullet and Blossom came barking up to us.

We were all dressed for the occasion in shorts and clean T-shirts, and acting as innocent as Aunty Pearl herself.

Three empty beer bottles stood in a neat row on the side of Uncle Harley’s wooden chair. He’d put on a blue aloha shirt and had slicked back his hair.

Aunty Pearl was dressed in a nice muumuu—red, with yellow and white flowers. Her hand surrounded Uncle Harley’s. He always looked smaller when he sat with her on the porch.

“You ready?” Dad called.

“Ready as ever,” Uncle Harley answered with a grin.

Aunty Pearl seemed pretty happy, but it was hard to tell for sure because the pinched fleshiness of her face gave her a kind of permanent look that was difficult to read.

I went up on the porch and gave her a hug. I did that every time I came up, even if I was just there a few hours before. Small beads of perspiration dotted her upper lip, but the heat of the day had passed and it was beginning to cool down some. No matter how hot it was, she always seemed happy to see me.

Keo and I followed Dad, Uncle Harley, and Uncle Raz to the pigpen. “Want to double it?” Uncle Harley asked, looking Uncle Raz straight in the eye. “Two hundred bucks?”

Dad looked at Uncle Harley like he’d just made a huge
blunder. Uncle Raz’s jaw dropped slightly. He glanced over at Dad, then back at Uncle Harley. Then he smirked. “You’re on, sucker of suckers. “

Uncle Harley seemed happier than usual, as if he knew something that no one else knew. But then he always looked that way when a bet was at stake. He swung his arm out in the direction of Uncle Raz’s Toyota. “Bring your truck to the ramp.”

The ramp was something Uncle Harley had cooked up for Aunty Pearl so she wouldn’t be stuck at home so much. Uncle Harley no longer had the strength to lift her into the front seat of his truck, even if she could have fit, which we all began to doubt. So he built a small rock retaining wall and spent a couple of days dumping dirt behind it, shaping it and tapping it into a long, easy ramp. It worked perfectly.

“Keo, Sonny,” Uncle Harley called. “Go get Alii.”

Keo went into the pigpen and tied a rope around Alii’s neck. Then, dangling a fishtail in front of him, we coaxed him out to the ramp. It was a good thing Keo had thought about the rope because Alii got a little nervous when Bullet and Blossom whisked around him yipping and yapping.

“You boys ride with the pig,” Uncle Harley said after we got Alii into the back of Uncle Raz’s truck. “Keep him from moving around when we get out on the road.”

“Where are we taking him?” Keo asked.

“You’ll see.” It was clear that Uncle Harley didn’t want us asking any questions.

Uncle Raz moved the truck away from the ramp and Dad backed Uncle Harley’s truck into its place. Uncle Harley went up to the porch to help Aunty Pearl. She looked happy. She loved going places.

Dad dropped the tailgate on the truck and waited while Uncle Harley ceremoniously accompanied Aunty Pearl from the house, down the dirt yard, and up the ramp. Aunty Pearl
walked onto the bed of the pickup and sat gracefully down on a special upholstered seat that ran from side to side just behind the cab. She looked up at Uncle Harley and smiled, then raised her hand. Uncle Harley squeezed it.

The bed of the truck had sunk at least two inches when she stepped onto it. She was
some
woman. Her Hawaiian name was Malanamekahuluohemanu, light as the feather of a bird. A name that fit her spirit perfectly.

“Okay, let’s go,” Uncle Harley said, climbing into the cab. But we didn’t get two feet before Grampa Joe and Tutu Max came roaring up the dirt driveway in their rusting Impala, a cloud of dust billowing out behind them.

If anyone could mess up a nice plan, Tutu Max could.

Tutu Max was driving, as usual. Next to her, Grampa Joe looked like a pet dog leaning against the door with his nose out the window. They pulled up next to Uncle Harley’s truck. Tutu Max looked over at her daughter.

“Hoo-ie, Pearl honey, where you off to?” Tutu Max asked, ignoring Uncle Harley.

Aunty Pearl smiled down at her. “Downtown. The pier. See the boats and fish.”

Like a wary cat trying to keep watch over her trusting, openhearted kitten, Tutu Max had a habit of always checking up on her child, even though Aunty Pearl had been married to Uncle Harley for more than ten years.

“Why the pig over there?” Tutu Max asked, hooking her thumb over toward Keo and me.

“Gonna weigh him. Tomorrow Daddy going shoot ‘urn,” she said in the smooth, lilting, Hawaiian-style English she and Tutu Max spoke.

Tutu Max looked sideways over at Uncle Harley. He nodded slowly and lifted his wrist from the steering wheel in a lazy wave, holding his hand open, fingers spread, like signaling the number five.

Tutu Max squinted her eyes. “Why’s the pig in the truck?”

“Like the last supper,” Uncle Harley said. “You know, like when they plan to shoot a prisoner the next day they give him what he wants for dinner? Same thing. Only this is a last ride.” He smiled after he said it, knowing he’d given her a good answer without having given her an answer at all. Uncle Harley once told Keo and me that Tutu Max was the nosiest person he’d ever known.

Tutu Max glared at Uncle Harley. She knew he was a master at the straight-face lie. And ever since Aunty Pearl broke her foot climbing onto Uncle Raz’s boat, Tutu Max had become as protective of her as a starving cat with a fish head. The fact that Uncle Harley mostly ignored her and usually just went about whatever he was doing didn’t help.

Tutu Max turned back to Aunty Pearl. “How long you going be gone?” she asked.

“Couple hours.”

“We wait here for you,” Tutu Max said.

Grampa Joe had yet to say a word. But no one expected him to, not when Tutu Max was around.

“Fresh
sashimi
in the icebox,” Aunty Pearl said. “We come back soon.”

Keo and I waved as we pulled away. The pig got a little jumpy and we had to hold on to him.

I looked forward, to the back of Uncle Harley’s truck. Long, loose strands of hair flew across Aunty Pearl’s face. She nearly filled the seat from one side of the truck to the other. Once when we were out fishing, Uncle Harley told me that Aunty Pearl was the kindest and most beautiful woman he’d ever known. There was nothing she owned, he said, that she wouldn’t give to someone else who needed it. And if something was bothering you, she’d come over and sit by you, and talk about all kinds of things that had nothing to do with your problem. But pretty soon you’d be pouring your heart out.

She had a way, he said. He didn’t know what he’d done in his life to deserve it, but he was the luckiest man on the Big Island.

The torches along the water at Kona Inn had already been lit by the time we got to the pier, and the sky was a golden-orange from the sun just disappearing below the horizon. The serene, wavering sigh of a Hawaiian steel guitar, wrapped within the sweet smell of cooking steak, drifted out from the restaurants and gave me a warm, comfortable feeling, as if all I could ever want out of life was already around me.

We parked on the pier with the front of the truck facing away from the bay so Aunty Pearl could sit and watch the charter boats come in. She was a sight, sitting there surrounded by Uncle Harley and a good-sized collection of her countless friends and relatives. Some sat in the bed of the truck with her, like servants at the feet of the queen. People who’d never seen Aunty Pearl before watched from a distance, amazed. Aunty Pearl smiled at everyone, and waved.

The
Kakina
was just in and its crew was hoisting a fat blue marlin from the water. As the fish rose to the pier, a watery stream of blood and ocean flowed into the harbor from its rough bill. A man pulled the hoist around and swung the fish in over the pier. The skipper called out the weight. “Eight hundred forty-two pounds.” A murmur rose from the crowd.

Uncle Harley, Dad, Uncle Raz, and a couple of their friends stood around Aunty Pearl drinking beer and passing stories around. By seven-thirty almost everyone had gone home.

With Alii snoring in the truck, Keo and I squatted on our heels at the edge of the pier, staring into the darkening harbor and watching reflections of town lights shimmy out across the water. Keo had been pretty quiet all afternoon, mostly just taking in what was going on and keeping an eye on Aunty Pearl.

“Raz, back your truck up to the scale,” Uncle Harley said, startling me. “Keo, Sonny, get in the back with the pig.”

“What you going do, Daddy?” Aunty Pearl asked.

“Weigh the pig,” Uncle Harley said.

“Oh, good idea.”

Dad rigged a sling out of an old torn tarp and wrapped it around Alii’s belly. He tied it tight with wire fishing leader and looped the wire over the hook on the fish hoist. Uncle Raz pulled on the chain and Alii rose from the bed of the truck. Keo and I held him steady and kept him from getting too excited. His grunts and screeches were deep and rich, coming from way down inside him.

When he was three or four inches off the bed of the truck, Uncle Harley called for Dad to read the scale.

“Three sixty,” he called. “No, wait, three sixty-two.”

“Not bad, not bad,” Uncle Raz said, unimpressed.

“Yeah,” Uncle Harley said, ignoring the flatness in Uncle Raz’s voice. “Hard to beat that.” He looked at Uncle Raz with a face that invited him to add another couple of bucks to the bet.