Blue Skin of the Sea

by Graham Salisbury

  “In the skiff.”

  “He works all day on the barge and you think he’s going to take a ride out here?”

  Keo thought for a minute. My body settled down. The float tugged at Keo’s hands and he threw it back into the water. It sank, then reappeared.

  “When he hears we got a big shark on the line, he’ll come see. Why would they give a hundred bucks for a shark if they didn’t want to see it?”

  We rode back to the harbor with only the drone of the outboard and the slap of the hull on the water to break the silence.

  There were always so many people around the old man that we couldn’t get anywhere near him to tell him about the shark. When we asked Uncle Raz if he could think of a way for us to talk to him, he laughed. “You can see him in the movies.”

  Keo said nothing to Uncle Raz about the shark so I kept quiet about it too. Now that Uncle Raz was important he didn’t have too much time to fiddle around with other things.

  Keo and I went out to the end of the pier and sat down on the edge with our feet dangling over the water.

  “I got an idea,” Keo said, his eyes pinned on something unseen beneath the surface of the ocean. He was in one of his thinking trances. “The shark will die if we leave him out there too long. … ”

  I nodded. “Couple of days at the most.”

  Keo bit at his lower lip. When he grabbed on to something he was like the old man fighting sharks away from his marlin and he wasn’t about to let up until he won, or flat out lost.

  “I got it, I got it!” he yelled with a slap to his leg. “The box lunches! Uncle Raz takes the sixty box lunches out to the barge every day, right? Well, the old man gets one of those lunches.”

  “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:

  Dear old man,

  We are Keo and Sonny. We bave a shark for you. Look for us at 5:30 in the night after you work. We will be standing under the fish scale.

  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.

  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.