She whipped around on the steering wheel and spun the car about on the narrow road. I almost lost my balance. The key ring toppled from my nervous fingers to the cluttered car floor.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
“Going back toward them. The police are stupid. To them, the guilty always run. That is not true. Sometimes the most guilty stand and smile at your face. They will not think I would return you to the midst of them.” She touched my shoulder with a sudden downward gesture. “Slump down under the canvas. To the stupid police, you will resemble milk cases.”
I slid down. It seemed my face must be brightly illumined in the light of the approaching cruiser. As we raced past it, Hattie made a very undignified noise with her fat tongue between her teeth.
She held the wheel tightly in her pudgy hands. The car sped around the twisting, ascending highway curves. I’d pulled up a little watching and I saw Albert Mosani and three uniformed patrolmen. A cruiser had been pulled into the middle of the road, its red blinker signaling a road block.
The policemen waved their hands as Hattie approached with slackening speed. When the police saw she was not going to stop, they leaped aside. But Mosani ran out into the road shouting at her.
Hattie jerked the wheel sharply to the right, pulling around the line of parked cars and was able to squeeze past the cruiser. “I am wrong,” she announced simply. “Now they will pursue me.”
She was right. By the time we reach Pali, the road behind us was bright with lights, loud with sirens.
I didn’t say anything. I gritted my teeth and braced myself for the run downward. I was still trying frantically to unlock the handcuffs.
Suddenly and magically, a key worked. The cuffs opened and clattered from my hands. Hattie laughed. “All the time,” she said, “I have been hoping I could repay you.”
I massaged my wrists. Freedom was beginning to feel good, to have some meaning. Through the back flap, I watched the cruisers gain in the race. There was the sharp sound of pistol fire. But the rough drag of the car meant something else. A tire had blown out on the jeep.
Hattie began yelling at me to help her hold the wheel. She had stomped the brake pedal to the floor.
“As we go off the road,” she panted at me. “Jump and run. Into the cane fields, Jimmy. A man can hide there forever. There they’ll never find you.”
The car came off the road and I leapt far out into the darkness. I was already pushing my way through the rim of the cane field when the cruisers halted beside Hattie Contona’s jeep. Hidden, I watched while she bullied two patrolmen into changing her tire. I could still hear her screeching at them as I burrowed deeper through the almost impenetrable mass of cane foliage.
Every movement I made caused the cane to rattle like brittle paper. I had no idea what time it was when I came abruptly upon a fifteen foot pool, littered with green strips of cane foliage. I lay down beside the pool, breathing through my mouth and listening to the slight wind rattling across the field. I kept watching the sky beyond the cane tassels until I fell asleep.
I came awake with the east hung sun touching my eyes. It was already unbearably hot and breathless. Steam was drifting upward from the pool and the irrigation ditches.
I heard some one calling my name.
It happened twice, softly, insistently, a woman’s guarded voice. I was sure it was the heat, or a trick of the wind in the sea of cane stalks.
The third time, I crawled over to an irrigation ditch. On my hands and knees, I moved cautiously into it.
“Who is it?” I said. “What do you want?”
“Jim-mee!”
Now I knew I was dreaming. Sleek babes like Lanai in cane fields! Along the irrigation ditch she hurried. Wearing blue overalls and a blue shirt and carrying a felt hat in her hand. Her hair was loose about her shoulders.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded. I caught her arms in my hands. Only I knew I didn’t care why she was here — it was enough to feel her flesh under my hands!
I led her to the edge of the pool and we sat by it, breathing through our mouths in the stifling heat. She handed me a small bag of food. “Hattie came to me. She told me where you were. We thought you might be hungry.”
“Do you think they followed you here?” I said. Then I looked at her. “Or is that the idea, Lanai? Have you led them to me?”
She didn’t answer at once. Finally, she said in a low voice. “Eat anyway, Jim-mee, at least you have time for that.”
I didn’t know I was so hungry until I began to eat the sandwiches. I didn’t even realize I hadn’t offered Lanai one until both were gone. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“I don’t mind. I liked watching you.”
“Maybe I’ve gone a little crazy, Lanai. Maybe this business has driven me crazy.”
“Anyway, Jim-mee. You have not given up. A man who eats like you ate, is eating for the future.”
“No, you’re wrong, Lanai. There’s no future. I don’t believe it. That’s why I’m going to have you, Lanai. Here in this field. Because I may never see you again. They may be waiting for you to bring me out to them, but that will be later. Now there is you and me — and what I’ve wanted since the first time I saw you.”
“And I, Jim-mee, since I saw you.”
“You don’t have to lie about it,” I said. “You don’t even have to pretend. If you’re the Judas for fat Mosani, I don’t care.”
Her eyes studied my face. “All right, Jim-mee.”
I put my arm about her shoulder, pulling her back into the bed of foliage at the rim of the pool.
“How does it feel, you who want riches, to be had like this in a cane field?”
“All right, Jim-mee. Maybe you do not understand. I play in fields like this when I am a little girl. I swim in pools — no bigger than this one. I am quite a big girl before I see the fine cars and the lovely dresses that belong to women with money. When I was a little girl, I only wanted happiness, Jim-mee. You know what happiness was to me when I was a little girl? Someone who loved to play with me beside a pool like this.”
“Stop it,” I said. I was talking against her face. Our eyes were inches apart. “I want to hate you. Don’t you understand that, Lanai? When you have finished this little doublecross, and I am back in prison, I don’t want to remember that I ever loved you.”
“All right, Jim-mee.”
“I know what you are. The brass monkey. It was empty when I saw it. But it wasn’t empty when you got it, was it?”
“No, Jim-mee.”
As I talked, I was holding her in my hands, loving her, letting my hands feel the perfection of her, the warmth of her, the way her flesh seemed adhesive against my moving palms.
“Where did you get it, Lanai? Where?”
“From Her-bert, Jim-mee. You feel so good, Jim-mee. Why could you not have been a little boy beside my lonely pool with me. I could have been so different, Jim-mee.”
“Why did you let Herb start you in a thing like that? Why?”
“I could not help it, Jim-mee. It began at parties. Don’t you see. With Herb this thing only began because both of us were bad people who wanted much that did not belong to us. We could only hope to take it away from those who had it. I was so unhappy. At first, when I found he had no money, it was very bad. I was only fond of him at first. Later I do not like him. I am afraid of him. He tries to get me to do things I do not want to do. Things that will ruin the way I look — so that I can never dance any more. So people will not want to look at me. I want to leave him. Even Kam, so poor, that I don’t love at all, treats me better. He has these pictures of me. I do not even know when they are made. I cannot believe I am the terrible girl in them. He says it is a beeg thing. We will be rich, if I will help him. To be rich, I have so long desired. I agree.”
Her eyes closed like a child’s as I loved her, then opened, wide, liquid, swimming. Her lips parted, and I kissed her as hard as I could. She cried out against my mouth, straining against me. The fields
were breathless. The thin breeze crackled in the cane. The sun climbed, bearing down on us, but we were lost to it.
And when it was over, like some hurricane leaving you weak and lifeless when it is through with you, I lay away from her. I lay looking at her. “All right, you blackmailing murderess,” I said, “call them. Let them come for me now.”
But she was smiling, moving languidly. “Don’t be a fool,” she whispered. “Break some stalks, Jim-mee, make a shelter for us from the sun.”
I hollowed out a place near the pool, facing it, tied cane stalks, lacing them with foliage for a shelter. Then I carried in green strips and made a cot for her. She stood up then, stretching languidly in the sun, her arms above her head, golden and lovely. She came slowly and lay in my arms in the shelter I had made for us.
“In one day,” she said with an odd smile, “I must have all the happiness I am wishing for when I am a little girl. The seemple happiness, you know, of someone to love you. Alone Someone to be yours alone.”
“You read stories like that,” I said. “South seas. An island. A girl like you. A guy like me.”
“I like those stories,” she said. “I see them many times in movies. But never without weeping. Tell, please, what are you like when you are a little boy? Were you lonely?”
“No. I guess not. We had a lot of kids in the neighborhood — ”
“Little girls?”
“Sure. We used to play doctor.”
“I don’t like theem.”
“I don’t like ’em, either, now when I think about them,” I said. “Do you know something, Lanai? Lying here, with you in my arms, something I never thought I’d have, I am cured of an old illness. A sickness that turned to rot inside me, and made me hate myself, and the girl I’d loved, and everybody who came near me.”
“I would not let you be unhappy,” she said. “I would only let you be tired. Do you mean it is Lanai you love now?”
“I mean that I’ve found out that girl’s doesn’t matter. She’s faded and gone like the snows I think about every time I remember her. She had my baby, and didn’t even tell me about it! She let it die and didn’t even ask me to come to her!”
“Sometimes when we don’t love someone, we cannot help that we hurt them,” Lanai said against my shoulder.
“That’s what I know now,” I said. “But all these years that I’ve loved her so damned hopelessly, it didn’t seem fair that she could treat me this way, and go on being happy. Going on being unaware even that I was miserable and lonely without her! It got so nothing mattered. Anyone came near me, I tried to smash them. I tried to hurt them as I’d been hurt. I tried to see in their faces the misery that was inside me! And now, as simple as this pool, as simple as your being in my arms, I know that love is something you can’t force — ”
“Please to know, Jim-mee, it is something you cannot kill, either. It withers and dies, often from neglect. But you cannot tell it to die.”
I tilted her head back and kissed her soft, warm mouth again. She whispered against my teeth, “Nothing ever like this. Never like this.”
There was the abrupt sound of machine gun fire, and crackling and roaring in the distance. I shoved Lanai away and leaped to my feet. She was already pulling on the clothes I’d taken from her.
I looked at her, dressed, sitting at the edge of the pool. “Here they come,” I said bitterly. “Here come your friends.”
She stood up beside me and pointed. “They’re burning the field,” she said numbly. “Hear the crack of it? See the flames — all the way around us.”
“Get in that irrigation ditch!” I told her roughly. “Get out of here. Get moving right now! I don’t care what you have done to me, Lanai. Whatever happens, I had what I wanted — all I’d care about would be to have it forever.”
She pressed against me, her head against the sharp thud of my heart. “Jim-mee, listen to me. I can say nothing to you that you will believe. If you think I brought them after what we had together, how can words change what you think? Listen to me quickly. Some way, escape them, Jim-mee. By night, I will have a small boat at the harbor. Go to Hattie. She will know. I will get us away. We’ll go to the beeg island. From there, Jim-mee, we’ll go where ever you like. Will you promise? Don’t fight it any more, but come to me, as soon as it is dark? We’ll be happy, Jim-mee, you and I — and only you and I in all the world.”
She was gone then, running along the irrigation ditch. I watched her until she came to the first fire break. She paused then, lifting her arm to wave. I couldn’t see if she smiled. She was too far away.
I turned back, tired and sick all over. I found a cane stalk and cut off an eight inch link of it. I sat on the edge of the pool then and began to hollow it out, unhurriedly.
The fire continued, crackling and popping, roaring like thunder, the black smoke obscuring the sun, the only air now thick and sick sweet. Your insides wanted to heave upward rather than breath another drop of it.
I thought as calmly and as objectively as I’d ever thought in my life. Lanai had tired me, and made me indifferent to Mosani and his raging cane fire. I thought over all that had happened to me since I had met Herb in that Alakea Street bar. Of all the people I had met. Of Ona Kalani and the man who called himself her father. Of Lanai and Lester Sakayama. Of Hattie Contona. And then, I began to shiver. It wracked through me. It scared me, and sickened me, and broke my heart. And in that moment, I knew I had the answer to it all. I knew who had murdered Herb and I knew how it had been done. Never was there terror like the terror that sat with me on the edge of that pool. Horror I knew I could escape only in one way, to run down to Lanai’s boat in the harbor, and run fast and far and never stop, and never look back!
18
THE FIRE CAME hissing and crackling across the cane field. A gray plume rose above the writhing body of black smoke.
I didn’t bother watching it come toward me in an ever narrowing circle. I could feel the terrible heat of it. The air was too thin already in the hot tent of canes, and I knew the fire would soon consume what oxygen was left.
I finished hollowing the eight inch cane stalk and then I began pushing all the grass and tassels that rimmed the pond as deeply as I could under the water. All I was hoping to do was to keep the foliage at the edge of the water from burning.
When the heat became unbearable, I waded out into the pond. I sat there then with my head above the water until the heat blistered my cheeks and parched my lips.
I went under then. I kept the cane in my mouth and the top of it in the foliage just above water level. I had to hold my nose with one hand to resist the terrible temptation to breathe naturally. My throat dried out and began to ache. But I stayed there, holding myself down by clinging with all my strength to the very roots of the cane ratoons.
Even lying there, I knew when the fire had passed over me. The thunder of the crackling fire moved on. At last I couldn’t hear it any more beneath the heavy carpet of unburned cane foliage and tassels that I’d spread thick across the surface of the pond.
Then I heard the vibrations of heavy-booted feet at the rim of the water. I lay, hearing the indistinct rumble of voices. Then the vibrations receded and diminished as the men went away along the irrigation ditch.
My parched throat ached so badly now, I was forced to push my face up through the grass. There was nothing to breathe, even out of the water: the sick-sweet burned smell of the field was suffocating.
My lungs ached, and my heart hammered every time I breathed. I knew I had to get out of this field if I was to live. Keeping low to the water, I dragged myself along the irrigation ditch toward the highway. If they found me now, I no longer cared. I was so nearly dead, and so horribly sure that I knew who had killed Herb that I felt there was little Albert Mosani could do to me now that would matter.
At the edge of the field, brown burned grass clogged the ditch. I was gasping for every breath, the way you’ve seen a fish out of water do. My hands were burned and numbed. It took what
seemed forever to pull myself over the grass barrier.
There were no police cars in sight. I stood up and staggered across the road and down the other side into a tangled square of banana trees. On the ground were dropped, withered fruit, and the earth itself was spongy and damp.
I pushed through the small, thick bushes and emerged at last in a little woods. I toppled forward on my face and lay, breathing heavily of the cool air. I stayed there until it began to get dark.
Then I started walking.
• • •
I entered through the rear of the club. When I knocked on the manager’s private door, Eddie Kole himself told me to come in.
When the dark little man looked up from his desk and saw me, his mouth drooped open.
I saw him press a buzzer at his right hand. I backed against the wall at the side of the door just as it was thrust open.
Eddie Kole tried to say something as Hooks Alkao came in. But I lunged away from the wall and brought the side of my hand across Alkao’s neck with all my strength.
I didn’t even wait to see Alkao crumple. I came across Kole’s desk before the little man could get at those buzzers again. He went out backwards in his swivel chair, terror singing up through his throat.
I waited until Kole tried to get up. I put my fist into his large nosed face as hard as I could send it. Kole went backwards against the wall. Pictures trembled as he struck.
I backed to the door and locked it.
I dragged Kole out into the center of the room. I sat on a chair then and waited until Hooks Alkao sat up, still unable to hold his head erect.
“Is that enough, Alkao?” I said. “Do you want more?”
“You can’t get away with this,” Kole whined.
“I’m not trying to get away with it any more,” I told him. “All I want to know is, why did you lie? You’re mixed up in a marijuana-blackmail racket, Kole, and I know all about it. As dumb as the police are, as soon as they think about it a little, they’re going to know all about it. It won’t do you any good to lie any more. But if you lie to me, I’m going to stay right here and beat hell out of you until you decide to talk.”
The Brass Monkey Page 11