Today it wasn’t slow. The ticket girl remembered. And a bus driver. The girl had sold Ona a ticket for one of the little stops on the other side of the island. The bus driver said she’d sat just behind him and talked all the way over. She had a small week-end bag, and didn’t seem upset in the least.
I got back in the car then, wondering at the feeling I got about this business. Then I said to hell with it, and with the Packard feeling good under my hands, I took the long way, driving past Waikiki, and Diamond Head and curving along the rocky coast line until it flattened out, and the sun was in my face, the sea stretching red and green to the west.
I don’t know why the silence, and the red color of the water, and the neat white buildings that I was passing got inside me. But I drove up to a small group of cottages wishing to God life had been as simple as I’d once believed it would be, simple and good. I asked the manager if he’d ever seen the girl in the picture, and he smiled and said yes, and pointed to cottage three.
Ona herself opened the door of cottage three. She was short and slender, with lily-white skin, and almond shaped eyes. In a vague way, she resembled the tinted girl in the photograph. She was wearing a bright colored strapless halter over small, high breasts, and shorts to match. She looked at me and asked what I wanted, her eyes neither friendly nor unfriendly, just black and inscrutable. I asked her if she was Ona Kalani and she said she was, and still what did I want?
“May I come in?” I said.
She shrugged and stepped aside. The living room was smartly furnished, but the place didn’t have an expensive look. There were cigarette butts piled high in a tray. There were two glasses on the small drain-board across the room. One of the glasses had lipstick marks. Ona seemed alone at the moment however. She motioned me to a seat and sprawled over an armchair, one dark leg swinging as she watched me.
“This looks like fun,” I said.
She just looked at me. “It always sounds like more fun than it is,” she said, her voice faintly bitter.
I looked at her. “I may as well tell you the truth,” I said. “Your father hired me to find you. It wasn’t at all difficult.”
She looked at me. “Should it have been? I didn’t try to hide. A boy I know asked me to meet him over here for three days. That was yesterday. I do not want to marry until I am sure. So I said yes. I would come. I did not tell my folks because they are modern enough to object.” She smiled when she said this, and I decided I liked the kid.
“In the old days, it would have been all right. You could have come off here, and no one would have cared?” I said.
She shrugged. “Before the islands were spoiled.”
I laughed at her. “That’s just an excuse,” I said. “You don’t know any more about the islands before they were spoiled than I do. But I must tell you, if you’re going to insist on statehood, you’ll have to change your ways.”
“Who wants statehood?” she inquired. Her dark eyes smiled going over me. “I want to be happy.”
I looked about the small room. The divan evidently opened into a bed. But it was folded.
“You’re wondering where Albert is?” she inquired negligently.
I nodded.
“He went home,” she said. “Early. This morning. He said it was business. But I knew the truth. He’d had enough and was tired. He was very poor.”
I laughed again. “Are you ready to go home?” I said.
“My time isn’t up until tomorrow,” she stated flatly. She was looking right into my face. Her eyes grew hot. I asked her if she would go then, and she shrugged, nodding. “Why don’t you stay?” she said. “At least for supper. Will you?”
I looked around the room. I could hear the ocean slapping up on the shore not far away, the wind in the banana trees, the way the breath crossed her lips. “Is there a telephone?” I said.
“At the office,” she said. “They’ll be happy that you use it.” She went to the door and opened it. “I’ll fix a drink for you while you’re gone.”
In the office I called Troy. The hotel owner sat at his desk, pushed back in his swivel chair, sweat on his forehead, smiling up at me as I waited.
“Troy,” I said, when she answered. “I’m working on this Kalani thing. I won’t be home tonight.”
There was a long pause. At last Troy said, “I hope you find her all right.”
“I’m sure I will,” I said. I hung up.
Ona was fixing supper when I got back to cottage three. She had left the door slightly ajar and when I pushed it open, she was working at the stove. She’d tied an apron over her shorts, and the table was already set, with a thick green salad in the middle of it. She nodded toward the Scotch waiting for me. “How did you know Scotch?” I said, and she shrugged. “It’s what I had,” she said, “I’m glad you like it.” I had three drinks before she was finished fixing supper.
When she called me, I sat across the table from her. The heat had done something to her. It brought out the scent of her hair, it stood small particles of sweat across her forehead. It made her halter cling damply to her upthrust breasts.
The wind was rising outside, and the darkness rolled in from the red sea. We ate in complete silence. She was very dainty with her food, but filled her plate three times. I grinned.
After supper, nothing was said about my leaving. I lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling. I could hear Ona doing the dishes, and I supposed her romantic Albert had helped her do them before he got tired and ran away.
But lying there, I thought about another dark-skinned girl I had known during the war. And then my thoughts drifted in some confused way back across five thousand miles — the five thousand miles to that faraway spring with Julie in New York. The apartment up on 125th street, just off Amsterdam. The park below us, and Harlem below that. The long walks down Broadway. Over to Riverside Drive. Through the University grounds. Down to the river to watch the small boats winking in the night and the Jack Frost Salt sign above the Palisades.
We’d gone to New York to start over, Julie and I. We were young. I told her it would be better if I were nearer the publishing center. I didn’t say I wanted to get Julie away from her parents and the men in Carroltown who no longer even pretended to believe it mattered that Julie was my wife.
I could think back to the lovely spring, the summer before the enchantment of New York was gone. It was winter before I saw something was wrong. I could still see the lights of our tiny Christmas tree. Hear the carols on all the radios in the neighborhood. Children screaming and playing in the streets, the pleasant lights — red and green in the shop windows. The glow of the lights and toys in the windows. The way people smiled, people who passed you all year and never saw you, now saw you, and smiled. Julie and I had walked up Broadway where it wasn’t even like New York any more, but a town all its own, with bright lights for Christmas, with first run pictures at the RKO-Some-thing-or-other. It was all pleasant and cold with snow that sifted down and melted before it touched the pavements. “I’m homesick,” Julie said abruptly. “I’m lonely. I’m going back to Carroltown.” It was all so abrupt. The checks were coming more regularly. Always late and never enough, but more of them. We’d made over a thousand dollars last year. Not much over. I’m going home, Julie had said. As she might have said, I’m hungry, or I’m going to the bathroom.
She went home the day after Christmas. It was the first year of the war. There were uniforms. There was the draft. There were people laughing and people crying, and people saying it would all soon be over and I was numb. It was all a part of a bad dream. A dream that was going mercifully to end when I woke and found Julie in bed beside me. She was so lovely in bed, she wasn’t lonely then, or homesick. But I knew I couldn’t go to her. Then I was drafted. While I was at Bainbridge Naval Training Center, I got the bill of divorcement. Julie was charging neglect. Non-support. Incompatibility. Jealousy. Violent temper.
I was in training, it was winter and I couldn’t go to her. I went to the Chaplain. Begged,
pleaded. It was useless. When I left the training center it was spring again. The divorce was final, and she didn’t even answer my letters. I met Herb accidentally in the Penn Station USO, and he told me that Julie had had a hell of a time. She’d had a premature baby, only it was dead at birth. I telephoned, but her mother answered. I wrote, but it was like dropping letters in a garbage can. By that time I was in Hawaii, and then I met the girl that Ona now reminded me of.
“What do you do in Honolulu?” I had asked this girl named Manaki.
Manaki had smiled. “Whatever you do stateside,” she told me. To me, assembly line American from Carroltown, she was just another kanaki. I didn’t pretend to think her anything else, even after I met her polite, well-to-do family who leased sugar cane and pineapple fields on the big island. I wanted Julie but I couldn’t have her. To hell with Julie. I swam with Manaki across the island, near where I was right now with Ona, near Kalama, driving with her in a staff jeep up through Pali, not even looking at the beauty of the volcanic browns and reds of the island below me. I who’d once looked at everything — now since Julie — saw nothing except the hurt she’d left inside me. We drove past banana farms with bunches hung for sale beside the road, the white movie theatre at the Kaneohe crossroads. At Kalama we swam in the surf. I told her about my work, investigating for the Navy, and waiting for the war to end. But when the day came for me to return to San Francisco, there was nothing to go back for. I could see the anxious desire in every face around me. I decided I wanted to hurt Julie, the way she’d hurt me. I decided to marry Manaki. That’d show Julie. If I married a kanaki. When the news of my marriage got back to Carroltown to Julie, she’d know I didn’t care. She’d left me. So what.
Manaki was crying when I came along the walk of her home. “I love you,” she’d told me, “but I can’t marry you, My parents won’t let me. Don’t insist, darling. Don’t be a pakiki.”
“All right,” I said. “If I’m not good enough for you, I’ll go home.” But I hadn’t cared that I Wasn’t good enough. After Julie I didn’t care about anything. So I wrote a book in San Francisco, in a second rate hotel on Ellis Street. Making fun of the navy, bitter, sardonic fun. The bookshops had my picture, surrounded by windows full of “I Was the One in the Jeep.” It was a best seller for three weeks. My name, my success, my dust jacket was everywhere. I was everywhere. Do you hear the news Julie? I’m getting around. I’m everywhere. I’m busy enough I can get you out of my mind a little, I can forget you. For a while. At first with blond, tall Troy, I was sure I had forgotten. Troy’s folks were rich and dull. When I ran away from her and opened a detective agency on Hotel Street in Honolulu, she followed, casually turning up, casually staying on. “My folks like you ever so much,” Troy had said. “And I love you so.” So I had shown Julie at last. I had married a cold million dollars …
• • •
Only it wasn’t that simple. Surely, I didn’t want this nineteen year old, this Ona, whose appetites had frightened Albert back to town. Yet, lying there, I watched her, trying to make her attractive to my glands. Finally I did a hell of a thing. I decided she was Manaki, and I wasn’t good enough for her, and I would show her how in the hell would she live without me.
I sat up on the couch. The Scotch bottle was empty. Ona was crossing the room. I caught her hand and pulled her roughly down across me. I held her head up, straining her neck so that it must have hurt, but she said nothing. I kissed her against her mouth hard while I pulled off her clothes. Once, she said, “It would be so much better if I made up the bed!” But I said, “Hell with that, Ona.” And she seemed glad. This was what she wanted, and she went wild, almost growling as she clung to me …
• • •
In the convertible on the way home the next morning, she snuggled her head against my shoulder, with both hands clinging to my arm. She slept part of the way. I laughed at her, and told her she wasn’t as fierce as she thought. “It is you who are wonderful,” she said. “You make me not want to be fierce and hungry any more.”
I deposited her at her home on Date, and listened to her parents tearfully thanking me. Ona smiled and when her father offered to pay me, she laughed a little sharply, and then sat looking at me. I told him I would send him a bill. I shoved my hand in my pocket then, and that was the first time I remembered the check I had promised Herb Baldwin.
I looked at my watch. It was almost nine thirty. I told them goodbye and hurried across town on King to Aala. The streets were crowded in the morning. I went over the small bridge down near the park. A narrow-gauge train was pulling in to the Oahu Railway station as I turned into Aala Street and found the number of Herb’s apartment house.
It was very poor, dingy and unpainted on an alley. A stout woman answered the door and when I told her I wanted to see Mr. Baldwin, she stopped scratching herself long enough to point to an upstairs room. I went up alone and knocked. There was no answer. I called down and asked if she was sure he was in. She came up the steps, walking heavily, and nodded. She tried several keys until she found one that would fit the lock. Then she pushed open the door and waved me in.
I stood there in the door, staring. Herb was still wearing the same white suit he’d been wearing yesterday morning in that Alakea Street bar. He was sprawled across the bed, splotched with his own blood. In his hand was a small calibre pistol.
“Didn’t you hear the shot?” I said numbly.
The woman shook her head. “I didn’t hear nothing.”
“But he killed himself!”
“I didn’t hear nothing.”
“All right. All right.” I said. “Will you call the police?” I looked down at Herb’s body on the bed, and in my pocket my fist closed on the check I’d brought him.
That he wasn’t ever going to need.
5
I LEFT THE ROOM where Herb had been murdered and I drove swiftly out Nuuanu Street, and swung right up Pacific Heights. I held the car close to the curb and raced uphill. Troy’s house — and I always thought of it as Troy’s, and not as mine, or ours — wasn’t the richest on the mountain road, but it had a distinctive look: long, low, rakish and hugging the side of the hill, green roof gleaming in the sun.
I parked out front and when I reached the front door, Cari was there, holding it open for me.
“Where’s Mrs. Patterson?” I said.
“She sleeps. She hasn’t wakened this morning.”
I looked at the worried frown on the flat, ugly little face. “Sleeping pills?”
She nodded hesitantly. “Too many this time. She was most ill last night before she could go to sleep at all. Her eyes had the look of glass. I had not the heart to waken her this morning — before you came.” Her face was now reproachful. “Your dinner is ready.”
“I’m not hungry. Feed it back to the ravens, will you? When Mrs. Patterson wakes up, tell her I’ve gone to meet a boat.”
“A boat?”
“Yes,” I said as I went by her. “Maybe I’ll dive for pennies. A lei around my neck and an hibiscus in my ear. Tell her, will you?”
I went through the house to the downstairs bathroom. My clothes were sweated, and I dropped them off on the floor. The water felt good, but nothing could get the way Herb had looked out of my mind, and I went on sweating when I thought of having to tell Carole.
I toweled down and came out of the bathroom into the bedroom. Troy was sitting on the edge of the bed. She looked like the wrath of God, if I may pattern a cliche. She’d tied a diaphanous robe over the flimsiest gown, but she was making no effort to hold herself erect, letting herself sag. Her eyes were swollen, and ringed, a wrinkled sheet had left a welt along her cheek, her lips were colorless and dry looking, and she hadn’t bothered to comb her hair.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “You’re so beautiful all naked, and naked. Come kiss me good morning.”
I went over to her, picking up a fresh pair of shorts on the way. “Is this your face,” I said, “or are you standing on your head?”
/> I kissed her cheek flatly, but she put her arms around me and held on tight. She pushed her dry, hot face against me. Her hands moved, warm from her bed, and slightly feverish. “My wonderful, wonderful,” she said. “He’s everything in the world — but mine.”
She let me go then, leaning back on her elbows, watching me as I stepped into my shorts.
“I hear you’re taking sleeping pills by the gross now,” I said.
“Oh, that Cari, What do you care how I take them? The number written on that little box certainly won’t put me to sleep.”
“You know where you are when those things stop working, don’t you?” I said.
“Yes. I know. I even know who got me there, too.” She answered flatly.
“Why don’t you learn Canasta?” I said. “Or join a club?”
“Or play golf, or go to hell, or take a lover,” her voice was cold. “Why don’t I let you alone? Why don’t you say that?”
I was buttoning my shirt. “You said it for me.”
“Where are you going now?”
“Herb’s first wife is coming in on a Matson liner this afternoon — ”
“Why should that bring you out of your delightful little shell?”
“Well, Herb certainly can’t do it,” I said. “He’s dead.”
She just stayed there on her elbows looking up at me. Her face stayed the same, the puffy flesh under her eyes seeming to rise, her nostrils distending. Then she let her head back a little, so her hair touched the counterpane.
“How did it happen?” she said at last. “Did he drink something that finally agreed with him?”
“Don’t be bitter any longer,” I advised her. “Even if he was my friend, he’s now dead. Nothing you can say about him will matter now.”
She let her elbows relax, so she slid back flat, her arms close at her side. She stared up at the ceiling, her body outlined tight against her gown.
The Brass Monkey Page 3