Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  But if Hoxworth Hale failed to grasp the nettles of history, there was another who did, for as Hong Kong Kee walked down Bishop Street in the other direction he met Kamejiro Sakagawa proudly waving to his son, and Hong Kong asked, “Which one is your boy, Kamejiro?”

  “Dat one ovah dere wid de medals,” Kamejiro beamed.

  Since most of the Japanese were wearing medals won in Europe, Hong Kong could not determine which one was Kamejiro’s son. “Is he the one who has the red patch on his arm?” Hong Kong asked.

  “Hai!” old Sakagawa agreed.

  “I’d like to meet your boy,” Hong Kong said, and when the troops broke ranks on the dock Kamejiro said to his son, “Dis Hong Kong Kee, berry good frien’. He give me da money fo’ da stoah’.”

  With obvious gratitude, Captain Sakagawa thrust out his hand and said, “You had a lot of courage, Mr. Kee, to gamble that way on my father. Especially during the war.”

  Hong Kong was tempted to bask in glory, but prudence had taught him always to anticipate trouble and to quash it in advance, so he said forthrightly, “Probably you didn’t hear, but during the war I was stupid enough to make a very bad speech against the Japanese. Later, I was ashamed of myself and tried to make up.”

  “I know,” Shig said. “My sister wrote me about your speech. But war’s war.”

  “Things are much better now,” Hong Kong said. “What I wanted to see you about, Shigeo. When you come home you ought to go to college. Maybe law school. You do well, maybe I’ll have a job for you.”

  “You have a lot of sons of your own, Hong Kong.”

  “None of them is Japanese,” Hong Kong laughed.

  “You want a Japanese?” Shig asked, astounded.

  “Of course,” Hong Kong grunted. “You boys are going to run the islands.”

  Shig grew extraordinarily attentive. Standing directly in front of Hong Kong’s metallic eyes, he studied the Chinese carefully and asked, “Do you really think there’ll be changes?”

  “Fantastic,” Hong Kong replied. “I’d like to have a smart boy like you working for me.”

  “I may not work for anybody,” Shig said slowly.

  “That’s good too,” Hong Kong said evenly. “But everybody’s got to have friends.”

  When Captain Sakagawa climbed aboard the transport he felt completely American. He had proved his courage, had been accepted by Honolulu, and now he was wanted by someone. In a sense, he was already a Golden Man, knowledgeable both in western and eastern values, for although he reveled in his newly won Americanism, he also took pride in being a pure-blooded Japanese. Of course this latter was ridiculous, for he contained inheritances from all those nameless predecessors who had once inhabited Japan: some of his genes came from the hairy Ainu to the north, from Siberian invaders, from the Chinese, from the Koreans amongst whom his ancestors had lived, and more particularly from that venturesome Indo-Malayan stock, half of whom had journeyed eastward to become Hawaiians while their brothers had moved northward along different islands to merge with the Japanese. Thus, of two ancient Malayan brothers starting from a point near Singapore, the northern traveler had become the ancestor of Shigeo Sakagawa, while the other had served as the progenitor of Kelly Kanakoa, the Hawaiian beachboy who now stood with a pretty girl watching the end of the parade.

  Or, if one preferred looking north, of three ancient Siberian brothers, one bravely crossed the sea to Japan, where his genes found ultimate refuge in the body of Shigeo Sakagawa. Another crept along the Aleutian bridge toward Massachusetts, where his descendants wound up as Indian progenitors of Hoxworth Hale; while a third, less venturesome than his brothers, drifted southward along established land routes to central China, where he helped form the Hakka, thus serving as an ancestor to Hong Kong Kee. In truth, all men are brothers, but as generations pass, it is differences that matter and not similarities.

  IN THE irrelevant sense of the word, this Kelly Kanakoa of whom I just spoke was already a Golden Man, for at twenty-one he was slightly over six feet tall, weighed a trim 180, and had a powerful body whose muscles rippled in sunlight as if smeared with coconut oil. He was very straight and had unusually handsome features, marked by deep-set dark eyes, a gamin laugh, and a head of jet-black hair in which he liked to wear a flower. His manner was a mixture of relaxation and insolence, and although it was more than two years since he had knocked out two sailors on Hotel Street for calling him a nigger, he seemed always half ready for a brawl, but whenever one seemed about to explode, he tried to evade it: “Why you like beef wid me? I no want trobble. Let’s shake and be blalahs again.”

  Now, as Kelly stood watching the departing parade, he held in his right hand the slim, well-manicured fingers of a Tulsa divorcee who had come to Honolulu from Reno, seeking emotional reorientation after her difficult divorce. At the ranch where she had stayed in Nevada a fellow divorcee had told her, “Rennie! If you go to Hawaii be sure to look up Kelly Kanakoa. He’s adorable.” So as soon as Rennie had disembarked from the H & H flagship, Mauna Loa, she had called the number her friend had given her, announcing: “Hello, Kelly? Maud Clemmens told me to look you up.”

  He had come sauntering around to the luxurious H & H hotel, the Lagoon, wearing very tight blue pants, a white busboy’s jacket with only one button closed, sandals, a yachting cap, and a flower behind his ear. When she came down into the grandiose lobby, crisp and white in a new bathing suit edged in lace, he appraised her insolently and calculated: “This wahine’s gonna screw the first night.”

  In his job as beachboy, which he had acquired by accident because he liked to surf and had a pleasant joking way with rich women customers, he had become expert in estimating how long it would take him to get into bed with any newcomer. Divorcees, he had found, were easiest because they had undergone great shock to their womanliness and were determined to prove that they, at least, had not been at fault in the breakup of their marriages. It rarely took Kelly more than two nights. Of course when they first met him they certainly had no intention of sleeping with him, but as he explained to the other fellows hanging around the beach, “S’pose da wahine not ride a surfboard yet, how she know what she really wanna do?” It was his job, and he got paid for it, to take divorcees and young widows on surfboards.

  Ten minutes after Rennie met Kelly she was on her first surfing expedition, far out on the reef where the big waves were forming. She was excited by the exhilarating motion of the sea and felt that she would never be able to rise and stand on the board as it swept her toward shore, but when she felt Kelly’s strong arms enveloping her from the rear she felt assured, and as the board gathered momentum she allowed herself to be pulled upright, always in Kelly’s stout arms, until she stood daringly on the flying board. For a moment the spray blinded her, but she soon learned to tilt her chin high into the wind and break its force, so that soon she was roaring across the reef, with a thundering surf at her feet and the powerful shape of Diamond Head dominating the shore.

  “How marvelous!” she cried as the comber maintained its rush toward the shore. Instinctively she drew Kelly’s arm closer about her, pressed backward against him and reveled in his manliness. Then, when the crashing surf broke at last, she felt the board collapse into the dying waves, and she with it, until she was underwater with Kelly’s arms still about her, and of her own accord she turned her face to his, and they kissed for a long time under the sea, then idly rose to the surface.

  Now she climbed back upon the surfboard, and with Kelly instructing, started the long paddle out to catch the next wave, but when their board was well separated from the others, she relaxed backwards until she felt herself against the beachboy once more, and there she rested in his secure arms, paddling idly as his adept hands began their explorations beneath her new bathing suit. Sighing, she whispered, “Is this part of the standard instruction?”

  “Not many wahine cute like you,” Kelly replied gallantly, whereupon she shivered with joy and brought her body closer to his, where she could f
eel the muscles of his chest against her neck.

  It was a long, exciting trip out to where the waves formed, and as they waited for the right one, Kelly asked, “You scared stand up dis time?”

  “I’m game to try anything with you,” Rennie said, and she showed remarkable aptitude on the long surge in, and when the surfboard finally subsided into the broken wave, and when they were underseas for a kiss, she found to her surprise that her hands were now inside his swimming suit, clutching passionately, hungrily. When they surfaced, his black hair in his eyes like a satyr’s, he laughed and said approvingly, “Bimeby you numbah one surfer, get da trophy, Rennie.”

  “Do I do things right?” she asked modestly.

  “You very right,” he assured her.

  “Shall we catch another wave?” she suggested.

  “Why we not go on up your room?” he asked evenly, keeping his dark eyes directly on her.

  “I think we’d better,” she agreed, adding cautiously, “Are you allowed upstairs?”

  “S’pose you forget your lauhala hat on de beach, somebody surely gotta bring it to you,” he explained.

  “Is that standard procedure?” Rennie asked coyly.

  “Like mos’ stuff,” Kelly explained, “surfin’s gotta have its own rules.”

  “We’ll play by the rules,” she agreed, squeezing his hand. And when he got to her room, holding the sun hat in his powerful hands, he found that she had already climbed into one of the skimpiest playsuits he had ever seen, and in his years on the beach he had seen quite a few.

  “Hey, seestah! Wedder you wear muumuu or sundress or nuttin’, you look beautiful,” he said approvingly, and in her natural confusion over her divorce, this was exactly what she wanted to hear, and she dispensed with the customary formalities of such moments and held out her arms to the handsome beachboy.

  “Normally I’d order a Scotch and soda, and we’d talk a while … Let’s take up where we left off under water.”

  Kelly studied her for a long, delicious moment and suggested, “Alla time, dese badin’ suit get wet too much.” And he slipped his off, and when he stood before her in rugged, dark-skinned power she thought: “If I had married a man like this there’d have been no trouble.”

  Now, as the parade passed down Bishop Street, she was about to leave Hawaii, and she held his hand tightly in the last minutes before boarding the Mauna Loa. For nine days she had lived with Kelly passionately and in complete surrender to his amazing manliness. Once she told him, “Kelly, you should have seen the pathetic little jerk I was married to. God, what a waste of years.” Now she whispered, in the bright sunlight, “If we hurried to the ship, would we have time for one more?”

  “Whassamatta why not?” he asked, and they clambered aboard the big ship and sought out her stateroom, but her intended roommate was already unpacking, a tall, rather good-looking girl in her late twenties. There were several embarrassed moments, after which Rennie whispered to Kelly, “What have I got to lose?”

  She addressed the girl directly and said, “I’m sorry we haven’t met, but would you think me an awful stinker if I borrowed the room for a little while?”

  The tall girl slowly studied Rennie and then Kelly. They were an attractive couple, and she laughed, “A vacation’s a vacation. How long you need?”

  “About half an hour,” Rennie replied. “They have a band upstairs.”

  “And a full orchestra right here,” the girl laughed, and before she had climbed to the next deck, Rennie was undressed and in bed.

  Later she confided, “For five days I’ve been imagining what it would be like to have you back in New York. How old are you, Kelly?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Damn. I’m twenty-seven.”

  “You no seem twenty-seven yet, not in bed,” the beachboy assured her.

  “Am I good in bed?” she pleaded. “Really good.”

  “You numbah one wahine.”

  “Have you known many girls?”

  “Surfin’ is surfin’,” he replied.

  “For example, Maud Clemmens? Did you sleep with her?”

  “How you like s’pose nex’ week somebody ast me, ‘How about Rennie? Dat wahine screw?’ ”

  “Kelly! Such words!”

  “Da whistle gonna blow, Rennie seestah,” he warned her, climbing into his own clothes.

  “I went down to the library, Kelly,” she said softly. “And there it was, like you said. This big long book with the names written down by the missionary. It says that your family can be traced back for one hundred and thirty-four generations. It must make you feel proud.”

  “Don’t make me feel notting,” Kelly grunted.

  “Why does a Hawaiian have the name Kelly?” she asked, slipping on her stockings.

  “My kanaka name Kelolo, but nobody like say em.”

  “Kelly’s a sweet name,” she said approvingly. Then she kissed him and asked, “Why wouldn’t you take me to your home?”

  “It’s notting,” he shrugged.

  “You mean, your ancestors were kings and you have nothing for yourself?”

  “I get guitar, I get surfboard, I get cute wahine like you.”

  “It’s too damned bad,” she said bitterly, kissing him again. “Kelly, you’re the best thing in Hawaii.” They went on deck and she made a quick sign to her roommate, thanking her. The tall girl laughed and winked. When the whistle blew for the last time, warning the various beachboys who had come down to see their haole wahines off, Rennie asked hesitantly, “If some of my friends decide to come to Hawaii … girl friends that is …” She paused.

  “Sure, I look out for dem,” Kelly agreed.

  “You’re a darling!” she laughed, kissing him ardently as he pulled away to run down the gangplank. In the departure shed the beachboy Florsheim—they called him that because sometimes he wore shoes—sidled up and asked, “Kelly blalah, da kine wahine da kine blonde, she good screwin’?”

  “Da bes’,” Kelly said firmly, and the two beachboys went amiably back to the Lagoon.

  Once or twice as the year 1946 skipped away, Kelly had fleeting doubts which he shared with Florsheim: “Whassamatta me? Takin’ care lotsa wahine, all mixed up. Where it gonna get me?” But such speculation was always stilled by the arrival of some new divorcee or widow, and the fun of working it around so that he got into bed with them, while they paid the hotel and restaurant bills, was so great that he invariably came around to Florsheim’s philosophy: “Mo bettah we get fun now, while we young.” So he maintained the routine: meet the ship, find the girl that someone had cabled about, take her surfing, live with her for eight days, kiss her good-bye on the Moana Loa, get some rest, and then meet the next ship. Sometimes he looked with admiration at Johnny Pupali, forty-nine years old and still giving the wahines what he called “Dr. Pupali’s surfboard cure for misery.”

  One afternoon he asked Pupali about his surprising energy, and the dean of beachboys explained: “A man got energy for do four t’ings. Eat, work, surf, or make love. But at one time got stuff for only two. For me, surfin’ and makin’ love.”

  “You ever get tired?” Kelly asked.

  “Surfin’? No. I gonna die on an incomin’ wave. Wahines? Tell you da trufe, Kelly, sometime for about ten minutes after Moana Loa sail, I don’ nevah wanna see da kine wahine no mo’, but nex’ day wen anudder ship blow anudder whistle, man, I’m strip for action.”

  In the lazy weeks between girls, Kelly found real joy in loafing on the beach with Florsheim, a big, sprawling man who wore his own kind of costume: enormous baggy shorts of silk and cotton that looked like underwear and fell two inches below his knees, a tentlike aloha shirt whose ends he tied about his middle, leaving a four-inch expanse of belly, Japanese slippers with a thong between his toes, and a coconut hat with a narrow brim and two long fibers reaching eight inches in the air and flopping over on one side. Florsheim always looked sloppy until he kicked off his clothes and stood forth in skin-tight bathing trunks, and then he look
ed like a pagan deity, huge, brown, long hair about his ears and a wreath of fragrant maile encircling his brow. Even the most fastidious mainland women reveled in this transformation and loved to lie on the sand beside him, tracing his rippling muscles with their red fingernails.

  Kelly preferred Florsheim as a companion because the huge beachboy could sing the strange falsetto of the islands, and together they made a gifted pair, for Kelly had a fine baritone voice. He was also skilled at slack-key, a system of guitar playing peculiar to Hawaii, in which the strings were specially tuned to produce both plucked melody and strummed chords. Many people thought of Kelly’s slack-key as the voice of the islands, for when he was in good form he gave his music an urgent sweetness that no other possessed. The melodies were swift and tremulous like an island bird, but the chords were slow and sure like the thundering of the surf. When the beachboys had nothing to do, they often called, “Kelly blalah. Play da kine sleck-key like dat.” He was their troubadour, but he rarely played for visitors. “I doan’ like waste time haole,” he growled. “Dey doan’ know sleek-key.”