As quickly as the eel had attacked the ulua flesh, Uncle Raz jammed the steel hook under its jawbone and backpedaled away as fast as he could.
The instant of puncture brought chaos. Bits of ulua drifted away from the writhing, slashing, shaking head. Uncle Raz retreated, running the fishing line through his fingers as he rose to the surface, keeping it taut, pulling the hook deeper into the eel’s jaw.
Back on the boat he wound all the slack line around an empty Coke bottle, and pulled back, increasing the pressure on the eel. “He’s trying to squirm deeper into his cave,” he said. “Get me the gloves.”
He told me to hold the bottle while he put the gloves on. Okay,” he said. “Give me a grip.”
I wrapped some line around his left hand. Then, reaching down over the transom, Uncle Raz took one turn of line around his other hand and leaned backward, pulling with the strength of his back and pressing upward with his legs. The evaporating salt water on his back beaded up and glinted sunlight against his red-brown skin. For the moment I’d forgotten about chopping away the black coral, absorbed in the small war Uncle Raz had started with the moray. There was no way, I thought, that the eel was going to beat this man.
“Put your hand on the line,” he said. I touched it with my fingertips and could feel the eel thrashing on the other end. Red stood behind us with his arms crossed.
“Just his head,” Uncle Raz said. “Most of him is still in the cave. The buggers are strong.”
We waited an hour while Uncle Raz fought with the eel. And though the thrashing had long since stopped, the eel solidly resisted with occasional tugging outbursts. A splotch of blood soaked through the bandage on Uncle Raz’s arm. It was swelling and must have ached, but he ignored it.
Honey watched us for a while, then silently slipped into the ocean to cool off. She climbed aboard less than a minute later. The water-filled top of her two-piece swimsuit slipped down an inch as she climbed over the transom. Red stood next to Uncle Raz with a beer in his hand, scowling at the time we were wasting.
Finally, when the sun was halfway from its peak to the horizon, Uncle Raz gained an inch of line. It woke me from the boredom of waiting, like a singing reel puts the life back into you after long hours trolling for mar lin.
“Hah! Now you feel the pain!” Uncle Raz said, fixing his eyes on the line. “We got him now, Red. We got him!”
Uncle Raz’s hands must have been cramping pretty badly, because he kept removing them from the line, one at a time, and opening and closing his fist. One inch gained in an hour didn’t seem to me like much to get so optimistic about.
When another two inches of reluctant line came out of the ocean, Uncle Raz almost giggled. Then, as if the line had been cut, he found himself falling backward, stumbling into the fighting chair.
“He’s out!”
Uncle Raz got back up and took in more line in long, steady pulls, as if he were hypnotized. Red and I, and even Honey, peered over the transom, and from the depths could see the shimmering brown snakelike image rising to the surface.
Uncle Raz let the eel pace back and forth along the back of the boat until it lulled itself into a sense of safety, until it felt no reason to panic.
“Sonny! The club!” he said, and I handed him the heavy, gray wooden fish mallet. He held it still in one hand, waiting for the right moment. Uncle Raz lifted the line and slowly pulled the eel from the water.
At the precise moment the brain crossed the sharp edge of the gunwale, he beat down on it, over and over, until the eel stopped thrashing. Honey covered her ears with her hands.
When the eel was dead Uncle Raz pulled it into the stern cockpit. “Holey moley!” Six feet of muscle and slimy mucus, nearly as thick as Uncle Raz’s arm.
Even though Uncle Raz was pretty sure it was dead, he kept his feet as far from the eel as he could, and told Red and me to stay back.
But the eel was as lifeless as a hose, almost pitiful. Uncle Raz put it in the fish box.
With the eel gone and the way to the bottom of the hollow clear, Uncle Raz returned for the black coral. Red and I followed him again and looked into the cavern. Everything was calm, as if no battle had ever occurred. The black coral was framed below by the sides of the well.
Within seconds Uncle Raz had removed it from its base without losing a single point on its thousand branches. He rose slowly, delicately carrying the black jewel.
Red ran out of air and rose to the surface, but Uncle Raz and I paused to look back down. Where the black coral had been there was only a small, empty white sand oval. It must have lived there a hundred years. We’d scared the rainbow of fish into the caverns. The well was a bland pit, silent.
Red beat us to the boat and climbed aboard. Uncle Raz carefully handed him the black coral and pulled himself up after it, then reached over the gunwale to give me a hand.
The coral sparkled in the sun. Its branches reached out in every direction, growing more delicate toward the ends, like a leafless tree of obsidian. It nearly filled a third of the stern cockpit. Honey sat up and pulled her knees to her chin.
“Honey,” Red said. “It ain’t no marlin, but it’s something.”
“What is it?” she asked from behind her reflecting sunglasses.
“Black coral. A beaut, ain’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” Honey whispered.
“It’ll look great behind the bar,” Red said.
Honey took off her glasses and looked up at him. Her eyes were so beautiful I could feel it in my stomach, a kind of tingling. She smiled at Red, and he beamed over at Uncle Raz. Just before Honey put her glasses back on she glanced at me, eye to eye, as if she could read my thoughts.
“Sonny,” Uncle Raz commanded. “Put the gear away and throw some water over the deck.”.
The sun was low to the horizon by then and the sky was beginning to close down. As excited as Uncle Raz had been about getting the coral for Red, he was strangely silent on the way back to the harbor. I gazed at the trees and coves and scattered houses along the shoreline as we cruised by. The land rose from black lava washed by white foam, through lush green jungle midlands and on up Hualalai, past the tree line to its purple peak, a huge, magnificent mountain that never failed to free my imagination.
But this time it wasn’t the same. I was staring at the island but my mind was miles away. I felt edgy, thinking about the dream-memories that still surfaced, the same words that kept coming back to me whenever something scared me. Don’t ever do that again, boy! Never! I’d heard them somewhere. But where? I felt empty not knowing. I wondered if Uncle Raz was feeling empty, too, thinking about the pit where the black coral had been. The fish would return, but the well would never look the same again.
Just before we reached the harbor, we passed by the point where the Hilton was going to be. When Uncle Raz caught me watching him staring at the point, he looked away and took us quickly into the harbor.
Red paid Uncle Raz a hundred dollars more than he had to, and tipped me with a twenty dollar bill, the biggest tip I’d gotten that summer. I couldn’t believe it—twenty dollars! A brand new spinning rig came immediately to mind, and maybe a fishing tackle box if there was any money left over. I thanked Red again and again, and shook his hand.
He smiled and patted me on the back. “Lots more where that came from, boy.”
Uncle Raz pulled the stern up next to the pier and followed Red off the boat. I handed Honey’s bag up to Uncle Raz.
Honey put her hand out for me to help her up onto the pier. She paused a moment, holding my hand and taking off her glasses with her other hand. She smiled, then leaned close and kissed my forehead.
Uncle Raz drove Red and Honey off to Kona Inn with the black coral nestled safely into the center of an old truck tire in the bed of the truck.
I dragged the hose out of the stern storage hatch and screwed it into the fresh-water spigot on the pier. Water shot out into the harbor when I turned it on, making bright slapping sounds. I stood barefoot on the warm
concrete watching Uncle Raz’s truck drive through the village until it was swallowed up by the trees at the end of the seawall.
“Hey!” a man yelled. “No waste the water. Turn ‘urn off if you’re not going to use it.”
“Sorry,” I said, snapping back. I started washing down the boat, feeling richer than I’d been in a long time.
When Uncle Raz returned, we took the boat out to its mooring without saying much to each other. He moved his arm tenderly, as if it were hurting pretty badly. Just before climbing into the skiff to come back to shore, Uncle Raz said, “We made a lot of money this time, Sonny.”
I nodded and said, “Yeah.”
Uncle Raz started the outboard and swung around toward the pier. The sky had turned red out near the horizon, and a rich, deep metal-blue above the mountain.
The skiff vibrated through me as I leaned over the side, studying the dark, mysterious coral heads and bright turquoise sandy spots as we glided over them. I traced a small circle on my forehead with my fingertips, tranquilized by the hum of the outboard. It was strange, but I missed Honey.
I met Uncle Raz on the pier at six-thirty the next morning to get the boat ready for an eight-o’clock charter. He parked his truck crooked in the parking stall and sat there a minute before getting out. He looked as if he’d just gotten up, a flattened swirl of hair mashed on the side of his head.
When we took the skiff out to get the Optimystic, I noticed that his arm wasn’t bandaged. The area around the eel bite was red and swollen, but it didn’t seem to bother him.
Then, when we brought the boat in from the mooring, he banged the hull into the truck-tire fenders alongside the pier, leaving a jagged black scar on the side of the boat.
Dad was gassing up the Ipo at the time and had seen the whole thing. He came over and dropped down onto the Optimystic to see what was going on.
“Nothing,” Uncle Raz said. “I just have a sore arm, that’s all.”
Dad took one look at the bite and headed straight for Uncle Raz’s ship-to-shore radio to call Uncle Harley. He told him to get on down and take Uncle Raz to the doctor. The bite was infected. He needed some attention, and probably a tetanus shot.
But it wasn’t Uncle Harley who showed up. It was Tutu Max.
“Shee, you need to get married,” she said, studying Uncle Raz’s arm. “You need someone to act as your brain. How come you let this get so bad?”
Uncle Raz groaned. “Wha’choo doing here, old lady?”
Tutu Max ignored the question and shook her head. “I getting too old for this. Look at you, all puff up on the arm and you don’t even know it.”
Uncle Raz frowned, and Tutu Max wagged a finger at him.
“Get in the car. We going to the doctor.”
“But … ”
“No buts. Get!”
“Don’t worry,” Dad said, trying to suppress a smile. “Sonny and I will take care of the charter.”
Tutu Max not only carted Uncle Raz up to the doctor, but also took him back to her house and kept him there for two days, and she wouldn’t even let him drink a beer. Dad and Uncle Harley thought it was hilarious.
I carried the twenty dollar bill around for more than a week. I could feel it in my front pocket, folded once and lying flat against my thigh.
Finally I bought a new spinner and a fishing tackle box with three trays, the kind I’d wanted for years. I even had enough left over for a couple of new lures.
I should have been bragging to Keo about my riches. He’d never gotten a twenty dollar tip. And as far as I knew, he’d never been kissed by someone as beautiful as Honey.
But I kept it all to myself.
Whenever I stood at the edge of the island, where rock and water boomed in a blaze of white brightness, I always chose to face the sea. “Never underestimate its power,” Dad had told me. “It could wake, yawn, and swallow you between one heartbeat and the next.”
On Saturday, May 21, 1960, I spent the night up at Keo’s house. Uncle Harley was visiting Tutu and Grampa Mendoza in Honolulu, and Dad and Uncle Raz had driven over to the other side of the island, to the Suisan fish market in Hilo.
Aunty Pearl sat at the kitchen table listening to the one Honolulu radio station we could get in Kona and looking at some photos in an old album.
The day’s heavy overcast had broken up, and in the gaps between clouds, the first stars, like tiny silver fish scales, sparkled against a purple twilight sky.
“Boys, come see these pictures,” Aunty Pearl called after we’d finished feeding the dogs. We came in and sat across from her at the table, which was more like a booth at a restaurant. The chairs moved around but the table was nailed to the floor and to the wall just under the window.
“Look at this,” she said, shaking her head. “Here’s your daddy, Keo, when he was just a little older than you. What a lolo that boy was.” She turned the album around and there was Uncle Harley waving at the camera with a stick fish in his mouth. It shot out from both sides of his face, about half a foot on each side.
Keo laughed at the picture. “Was he really that crazy?”
“Crazy? That was normal for him. He was always showing off fofme.” She turned the album back around to face her, then smiled, and tapped the picture with her finger. “I never loved anyone but that silly boy there with the fish in his mouth.” It was impossible to imagine Uncle Harley without Aunty Pearl.
“Show Sonny the one where he’s swimming with the cow,” Keo said.
“Gotta go way back for that one.” Aunty Pearl flipped the pages to the beginning. “Here it is. There’s Daddy by the cow, and there,” she said to me, pointing to a boy standing on the sand watching the cowboys swim the cows out to the cattle boat, “is your daddy. “
Dad and Uncle Harley, like me and Keo.
“And look, there’s your Uncle Raz.” He was almost out of the photo, down the beach with a stick in his hand. “Your tutu said Raz was always chasing crabs, even when the cowboys came.” She clicked her tongue and shook her head. “He never could stand still.”
I flipped through the pages and stopped when I found a picture of Dad with his arm around my mother. They must have been about eighteen or nineteen. They were standing on the pier, a sampan behind them, and the palace in the trees beyond. Dad was thinner then, and not as muscular. My mother was about the same height as him, but with much lighter hair, blond mixed with light brown. She was leaning into Dad, her head tilted into his neck and one hand on his chest.
“Crissy was a sweet, sweet girl, Sonny,” Aunty Pearl said. “Your daddy still misses her. It’s hard even now for him to talk about her.”
I felt bad for Dad, but as much as I wanted to I couldn’t feel his sadness. My mother was just a name and a few photographs that held no life. She was a part of Aunty Pearl’s time, and of Dad’s.
Yet the picture of her hand on Dad’s chest stayed with me long into the night.
When I awoke the next morning something wasn’t right. Keo was asleep on the other side of the room, but other than his light breathing, there were no sounds—no dogs, no birds, no chickens clucking, no nothing—and the small window was full of gray clouds. Keo’s electric clock was frozen at 1:05.
When I tapped his shoulder, he woke instantly, and sat up.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. His eyes were both wild and blank-looking at the same time. Uncle Harley had trained him well. No one in our family ever took more than a few seconds to get out of bed once awakened.
“The clock stopped in the middle of the night, and the sky’s dark. Maybe a big storm.”
Keo tried the lamp, but it didn’t work. He slid out of bed, and I followed him into the dark kitchen. None of the switches worked there either. But strangest of all was the absence of Aunty Pearl. She always got up before us.
After prowling around we found her sitting outside on the porch, listening to a small transistor radio. The voice coming through was weak and covered with static. When she saw us she put her finger to her l
ips. We sat down on either side of her.
The reception may have been bad but there was no mistaking the news: a series of powerful tidal waves had hit the islands, but the worst had devastated the coastal areas of Hilo.
Dad! There, at the fish market in Waiakea Town—as close to the ocean as you can get.
The reporter sounded excited and a little shook up. “The force of the big wave was tremendous,” he said. “At least twenty-six bodies have been found.” Then, in a way that sent shivers through my scalp, he said, “You would cry to see Waiakea Town … not one wall is left.”
I jumped to my feet and walked away, and then back, then away again. Aunty Pearl and Keo sat side by side, as if they were thinking of what to say.
Aunty Pearl finally spoke. “Keo, take the Jeep. Go get Grampa.”
Keo was only thirteen. Aunty Pearl had never let him drive the Jeep when Uncle Harley wasn’t there, even though she knew he could handle it. But we couldn’t call Grampa Joe because the phone was out.
“Go through the pastures and stay off the main road,” she said.
It took a few minutes to get the Jeep going. But Uncle Harley always parked it on a hill so he could kick-start it when the battery ran down. I pushed, and Keo got it going. We turned uphill and inched and jerked our way through the tangled jungle of Christmas berry and towering mango trees, never shifting out of first gear. The road was rocky and overgrown.
“Did you feel an earthquake last night?” Keo asked over the whine of the engine.
“No. There wasn’t one.”
“Yeah,” Keo said. “It would have got me up, too. There must have been a big one, though. Somewhere.”
We lurched from side to side in squeaking seats as the Jeep climbed higher, from pasture to pasture. Keo sat forward with both hands on the wheel, chin high, trying to see the trail.
Tutu Max filled the doorway when we drove into the yard, as if she’d known we’d be coming. She held the screen door open and didn’t say a word about Keo driving. “Grampa’s listening to the radio.”
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