I leaned over far enough to hold my own mask against the surface and watch his descent. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. His legs kicked slowly and, with his spear and sling in one hand, he made long, slow strokes with his free arm. Though he didn’t appear to be exerting himself, he quickly grew smaller and smaller. It might have taken him half a minute to reach the bottom. Once he was on the bottom I could see it, thanks to my mask—hazy coral formations and smooth white sand, with Boat so far away he appeared as a small dark dot against the sand. It was like looking down from a tall building at someone on the street below, or watching something through the wrong end of binoculars.
He kicked under a deep ledge in the coral reef and disappeared.
He remained out of sight under the ledge for a minute or more.
My own heart pounded while I waited for him to come back out.
Finally he backed out of the ledge dragging his spear behind him. At the end of the spear, secure against the hinged barb, was a blue parrotfish—an uhu. We called them blue uhu, but their true color was closer to luminous turquoise.
Boat surfaced more slowly than he had submerged. Kicking easily, both arms flat against his sides, exhaling periodically, the bubbles he made rose faster than he did. Underneath him the luminescent uhu writhed at the end of the six-foot spear.
When Boat finally broke the surface he smiled and, with the spear bending under the weight, lifted his fish up and out of the water.
“Uhu!” he yelled. “Uhu, bruddah!”
I took the spear and lifted the uhu into the boat. Shot through the head just behind the large, opaque eye, the fish struggled feebly.
“It’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen,” I said.
“Plenty big,” answered Boat. “The big ones stay way out here.”
Without apparent effort Boat heaved himself up over the gunwale. He pulled his mask and fins off and sat there smiling, breathing easily, water glistening on his dark skin. Then he picked up the uhu and slid it away from the barb, off the spear the long way. When he had the fish free he smacked the head hard against the gunwale. The big uhu quivered and went still.
“Try pull the anchor up,” Boat said.
I pulled fast and hard hand over hand, coiling the wet rope as best I could at my feet.
“No hurry,” Boat said. “Take your time, bruddah.”
“I never speared an uhu. Are they real good to eat?”
“The best, bruddah!”
“How do you cook it?”
“No cooking. We eat the uhu raw. The only way is raw. Uhu was a sacred fish to old Hawaiians. This fish here is a man. Women uhus don’t have the bright color. You know about Hawaiian gods?”
I lifted the rusted anchor into the boat and placed it next to the uhu. The fish’s brilliant turquoise color had begun to fade. I looked at Boat, who was still smiling. “I read a little bit in a book at the school library,” I said. “I talked to Sammy Kaaua. He told me his uncle saw Pele once.”
“She’s the goddess of fire. Fire made these islands. The volcanoes did. Pele came here because she got chased here across the water by her sister. Across the ocean. If she never came, the islands never got made. I saw Pele twice. A pretty long time ago. If anybody sees her it’s out here on the water. She’s over us in the sky, she’s in the water, she’s close to us all the time. She’s inside us. But only Hawaiians see Pele. Not you.”
“I’m part Indian,” I said.
“What kind Indian?”
“Mohawk. From the East Coast. My great-grandparents were Mohawks.”
“That means you got your own gods. Ever seen one?”
“Not yet.”
“You young still. Maybe you will.”
“Maybe. I hope so.”
“I take you to a good place for kumu and aweoweo now.”
In the deep blue water on the way to the place Boat took me to spear, a pod of dolphins suddenly appeared beside us to ride our wake as we sped along. They were the big bottlenose dolphins, six of them, so close I could have reached out and touched the nearest one. I thought that their bright dark eyes looking up at us showed more than intelligence. I saw friendship there, and I saw humor, and Boat laughed aloud while the sleek, dark dolphins moved beside us, and Boat talked to them, loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the motor. “Hello again, bruddahs,” he said. “Good to see you one more time. Must be some ahi someplace close. Eat ‘em up. Take care, bruddahs. See you one more time soon!”
When Boat stopped talking, the dolphins vanished as quickly as they had appeared.
Then Boat talked to me. “Look in at that beach, bruddah. In a hundred years everybody there be dead. Everybody walking the beach, everybody in the Outrigger Club, all those rich ones in the Royal and Moana. Don’t you forget, we be dead too. Dust and ashes. Ashes for us Hawaiians. Dust maybe for you. These dolphins out here going to be dead too. Everything, everybody, in a hundred years. Only two things stay here forever: the ocean and the sky up over it. But us Hawaiians, even when we ashes we be out here after we dead. We be out here with the fish and dolphins and the sharks and the morays, forever in the ocean underneath the sky. Think about that, bruddah. Think how lucky us Hawaiians are. I’m one happy man!”
Boat laughed and slapped his big thigh with his big hand and kept talking. “Maybe a few old Japanese who just got born won’t be dead in a hundred years. They live a long time, the Japanese. Look at old Papa San at the Outrigger Club. Wait. Old Bruddah Papa San reminds me. Did I ever talk this story to you yet? After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor the navy paid me to dive down inside the wrecks and bring the dead bodies up. I brought up plenty. All those young boys in their uniforms. That attack came early Sunday morning, so some sailors didn’t even have the uniforms on. When I grabbed those boys their skin felt cold like rubber. Some boys looked scared and some looked happy. I never figured out how they could look happy. Plenty more boys are still down there inside that ship today. The reason the navy hired me was I could dive better than their own men could, even with their Aqua-Lungs. I could go more places. All those boys died so young. We all die—don’t you forget it—but the ocean keeps living. This ocean we in, right now right here, is here forever.”
Boat took me to a place he knew where the aweoweo were thick under a deep, dark ledge in thirty feet of water. When he dropped anchor we seemed to be in line with the Royal and the old barge, but twice as far out.
After Boat showed me the ledge he watched me spear.
The vividly red aweoweo stared with their round, bright eyes out from the darkness. I took only shots I was sure I could make and carried each fish back to the boat before returning for another. By the time I got them into the boat their color had faded to pink. The aweoweo looked small next to Boat’s blue uhu.
“Enough for today, bruddah,” Boat said after six fish. “Take what you need. Sometimes take less. Everything in this ocean gets eaten up by something else sooner or later. Sooner or later they do. We eat some too. Six is plenty for this place today.”
“I wish we could stay out longer,” I said.
“How much longer?”
“Forever maybe.”
“We go out again. I take you to Laie for the lobsters. You okay, bruddah.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You know what thanks is in Hawaiian.”
“Mahalo.”
“Mahalo for what? You okay. We go out again soon.”
“You’re okay too.”
“Mahalo.”
“Mahalo for what?”
Boat laughed and slapped his thigh and started the motor.
We roared straight toward shore, moving faster than the waves, the soft surge of each swell lifting us and perceptibly increasing our speed as we passed it. White clouds hung above the green mountains of Manoa Valley. Turkey, in a tourist canoe, waiting for a wave at Canoes, lifted his steering paddle in greeting as we sped by. The Royal Hawaiian was bright pink in sunlight, and there was Chick, sitting in front of his shed in the
shade of a red umbrella. The beach was fairly crowded now, with tourists walking along carrying towels, books, and handbags. Many swimmers waded in the shallow water. On the beach in front of the Outrigger Club wahines lay flat on their backs on brightly colored beach towels, their brown bodies shiny with coconut oil under the sun.
“I love this place!” Boat said from behind me. “Waikiki has the magic, bruddah!”
Iwa
Boat took me to Laie to gather lobsters.
In a borrowed, rusted, old red Jeep with the top down he drove up the steep, windy road over the Pali and down to the windward side.
On the way up he asked me about Doug.
“Is it true what I heard? Your friend went to the mainland?”
“His parents sent him away,” I said. “After they found out he ran bare-ass that night in Waikiki, they sent him to some kind of prep school in New Jersey.”
“I got nothing against your friend. I been seeing him at the beach for plenty years. But like I told you, something inside him isn’t right. He’s mad all the time. He’s always hating something. I don’t know what, but I see it there inside him.”
“His mother’s an alcoholic,” I said.
“Maybe that’s what I see. Maybe not. Maybe he’s a good boy, but I see the trouble in him. You help him out if you can, Mike.”
“I will. If I can.”
Near the top of the Pali, after some minutes of silence, Boat asked me what I knew about King Kamehameha.
“I know he’s the most famous Hawaiian king,” I said. “The first one to bring all these islands together. His whole name was Kalani Paiea Wohi o Kaleikini Kealiikui Kamehameha o Iolani i Kaiwikapu kaui Ka Liholiho Kunuiakea. Somebody decided they maybe should call him Kamehameha.”
Boat took both hands off the steering wheel and looked up at the sky and roared with laughter. He looked back down barely in time to grab the wheel and make a hairpin curve. “In a battle right here on the Pali where we are, Kamehameha pushed his enemies off this cliff. In every war they ever had the soldiers die young. If I laugh maybe one second longer back there, the same for us! Off the cliff!” This time when Boat laughed, he kept his hands on the wheel. “Sometimes people got to fight. Kamehameha had to fight. Sometimes I got to fight. Not so much like I used to. Sometimes you got to. Everybody does.”
Laie was a lonely palm-lined beach with a small island not far offshore. Scattered along the narrow beach were a few houses that Boat said were owned by rich haoles who came over mostly on weekends. The clear water was shallow a long way out over a jagged coral bottom. We wore old tennis shoes to protect our feet, and work gloves on our hands, and we carried burlap sacks.
“Only the biggest kind,” Boat said when we started out. “Six for me, two for you is all we need. I go down a little ways, you go out right from here. Look out for the morays.”
We waded out, and thirty or forty yards from shore we pulled our masks down over our faces and started looking.
There were plenty of spiny lobsters. When I had a big one cornered against the back of a hole or ledge I reached quickly and snatched it over the back and squeezed hard and stuffed it into the burlap sack. When I grabbed the lobsters they reacted by vibrating their tails so violently that it felt as if an electric shock was traveling up my arm. In fifteen minutes I had six lobsters. I kept the biggest two. The ones I dropped scurried over the coral and disappeared into the nearest cover. I was never more than chest-deep the whole time. Boat had collected his six big ones, two-pounders, by the time I had my two. We walked back to the beach through the warm water together.
“See any morays?” he asked me.
“No. Did you?”
“Two small ones. Two, three feet long.”
“What’s the biggest one you ever saw?”
“Six, seven feet. Right here in Laie. I poked my hand in under a ledge and the buggah hit like a snake. I showed you these scars. Remember?” Boat held out his scarred hand, and I remembered.
“But you didn’t kill it.”
“I never kill the morays. I bothered that moray in his place. The ocean is my place too, but it’s even more his place. Everything protects his place, just like Kamehameha did. The moray meat tastes good, but they say sometimes the meat is poison. I never kill the morays. Let’s go cook these lobsters up.”
“We collected wood and Boat built a small fire on the beach in the shade of some coconut palms. He boiled the lobsters in seawater in a fire-blackened iron pot he took from his jeep.
He held up one of his lobsters before he dropped it into the pot. “See this one here? A rock lobster. Australian rock lobster, they call it. I got no idea why they call it that when it lives right here in Hawaii.”
While the lobsters boiled he asked me more about Doug’s run.
“How come your friend Doug ran down Kalakaua? Was it really for the money?”
“It was. He got his car repaired so we could drive out to surf Makaha.”
“His parents had to find out because everything like that goes on the coconut wireless. Everybody had to find out.”
“I guess it was a dumb thing to do.”
“It wouldn’t be dumb if this was old Hawaii. And you got to get to the North Shore when the surf’s up. Nothing is bad about the way the gods made us. My gods, your gods, anybody’s gods. All gods are the same gods but the people can stink it all up. So your friend Doug is a boy so he got an ule. Every boy in the world has an ule. Every boy in the history of the world had an ule. Does somebody think we can keep ules a secret? Every wahine has a kohi. You think we can make that a secret? Who wants to make it secret? The gods made everything—uhu, lobsters, waves, sand, sky, sun, stars, and moon. Everything. The gods made men and women. Kanes and wahines. The gods wanted kanes and wahines to enjoy each other. Love each other. Why else did the gods make ules and kohis? Who cares if a boy runs down a street with his ule out? Nobody in old Hawaii. No streets in old Hawaii. I guess the missionaries cared. The haoles think what your friend Doug did was bad. The old Hawaii is gone now, and that’s why what your friend did was dumb. You got to know where you are. You got to know when it is. It’s way different now from what it used to be.”
As we talked and the lobsters boiled we dried off in the warm wind and Boat soon had streaky films of white salt across his dark skin.
Boat pointed out at the small island. “I speared a big ulua out past that island,” he said. “Six years ago it was. Forty, fifty pounds. Your friend Doug with the ule makes me remember about it. When I swam in past that island that day I saw two canoes on the beach and then I heard wahines’ voices. Happy voices, talking, laughing. So I went to look and I saw wahines lying on the sand in the sun. Those wahines saw me and jumped up and screamed and ran around like crazy and held towels up and put their bathing suits back on. The gods made us the way we are, so why did they do that? All I did was wave and turn around and go back in the water and swim back in with my ulua. Those wahines got ruined a long time ago by those missionaries. Someday, Mike, you going to meet a wahine who wasn’t ruined. That’s what I predict. When you see that wahine, you’ll know what kind she is right when you see her.”
When the lobsters were cooked Boat split the tails open and cut lemons in half and squeezed juice over the white meat. While we ate he pointed out at the sky above the island. “Way out there goes a frigate bird,” he said. “Iwa in Hawaiian. They got extra long wings. See the fork in the tail? If I could be another thing that’s the thing I’d want to be. All day long the iwas fly through the sky over the sea. “What could be better? I dream about it sometimes, flying like that. Flying free.” Smiling, he watched the highflying bird until it became a speck in the distance. “Tell me something, Mike.”
“What?”
“You young. What you want to be? What you dream about? I mean, besides wahines.”
“I don’t know what I want to be yet. I start college this fall. This September.”
“College where?”
“Boston.”
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br /> “Why Boston?”
“I got a football scholarship there.”
“You can play football right here at UH.”
“My old man wants me to go to Boston, to study business. He says it’s a good place for that.”
“So you doing it?”
“I guess so.”
Boat, still smiling, shook his head. But the smile was different now. “Then after college you want to be in a business? What kind of business? Why does your old man want that?”
“He’s a businessman. He talks about money a lot. That’s all I really know about it.”
“Here he comes back,” Boat said, pointing again. The frigate bird, flying lower now, was coming back at us, about halfway between the island and the beach. “He sees fish. An iwa can’t swim. He can’t get wet. He lives over the ocean and he can’t get wet. He can stay up in the air a week. He got to dive down and grab the little fish the big fish chase up out of the water. Here he comes. Watch.”
The frigate bird, close over the water, suddenly swooped down just as a shower of silver baitfish broke the surface. As the bird powered back up into the clear sky Boat laughed and slapped his thigh. “Got one!” he said.
“What happens if they get wet?”
“They die. They got to stay in the air. That’s their place. Water is the place for fish. That little fish the iwa got didn’t stay in his place. The beach is my place. The beach and the ocean. You got to find your place, Mike. You think your place is Boston?”
“Maybe for a few years. Four years.”
“Boston is way back in the East, right? Thousands of miles, right? Cold as hell there, right? How many thousand miles?”
“About five. I guess it’ll be cold.”
“I saw the Roosevelt game. You played damn good. I think maybe Boston is too far. Too cold. Listen, Mike. I want you to phone me up from Boston. Tell me how it is, how you do. Not so much the football. The other stuff. The business stuff. All that. Promise me you going to do that.”
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll tell you about Boston and you can tell me about the beach.”
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