Island Boyz

by Graham Salisbury

  We did this vectoring thing until it seemed to stop working. Night had fallen and the ocean was black. Lights on shore winked out at us, a long line of them along the shore and a sprinkling up on the flank of the mountain above.

  “It’s alive!” Steve shouted.

  “He’s right,” Chad said. “Look at the rod!”

  Randy left the wheel and came aft.

  The tip of the rod jerked, almost delicately, as if a fish were nibbling on the bait.

  “Wee-hah,” Steve said. “He’s still alive.”

  Randy touched the taut line with his fingertips, feeling the movement, frowning. “No he’s not. That jerking is sharks eating your fish.”

  Mercifully, at 8:35 Steve got the marlin up to the boat. It was a gruesome sight.

  Stringy red tendrils of meat flopped off the back end, just beyond the gills. Looked like huge worms as Randy gaffed the whole mess out of the ocean and flopped it down onto the floorboards.

  “Good Lord almighty,” Steve whispered.

  All of us stood gaping down on the giant fish head at our feet, its big round eye stunned in death, lifeless sword stabbing out. It was about the size of a fifty-pound bag of rice. Very little blood leaked from it, most of it sucked out by the sharks and sea.

  After we’d seen enough, Randy tossed it overboard. It was too dark to see anything in the black water, but you could sure hear the sucking sounds of sharks ripping it back under.

  Randy nodded for me to go in and throttle up. “Let’s take her home, bro.”

  On the way back Randy radioed Dad and told him about the bad-luck marlin, then told Chad and Steve stories of how sharks are half-blind, and how if they surprise you by showing up while you’re diving somewhere, you can sometimes scare them away by screaming at them under water. Or by punching them in the nose.

  There were two things wrong with that advice as far as I was concerned: One is, how can you throw a punch at anything under water? And two, could I even imagine myself punching a shark? What a joke.

  Funny thing is, Randy would do it.

  It was peaceful coming in late like that. The harbor, the boats asleep at their moorings. The taste of the sea on your tongue, the smell of cooking steaks in the air. It was the part of boats I liked best.

  I stood on the bow with the rope in my hands, ready to jump off as Randy eased up to the pier. Chad and Steve were back on the stern deck, drinking beer, feeling pretty good.

  Dad, Mama, and Chad’s and Steve’s wives were sitting in the bed of Dad’s truck. He’d backed up and parked it right where we’d be coming in, the bed facing the water. They looked like a bunch of my friends, having a good time sitting around talking story.

  A couple of feet from the pier, Randy reversed the engine to slow the Iwalani.

  Dad hopped out of the truck and walked over. I tossed him the line to tie off, then crabbed back along the gunnel to throw him the stern line. Dad tied that one off, too.

  Randy shut the engine down and came aft.

  Steve threw his arm around Randy’s shoulder and looked up at Dad. “This boy here is one heck of a skipper, Cal.”

  Dad grinned and said, “Well, of course he is. I trained him myself. Except I was hoping he’d catch you more than a head.”

  “Hah!” Chad said. “You should’ve seen it. Gruesome.”

  “So where is it?”

  “Well, we sort of did a catch-and-release,” Steve said.

  Dad chuckled. “One way to look at it.”

  “I think it was dead before the sharks got it,” Randy said.

  Dad shook his head. “It happens. Just sorry you lost your fish, men.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” Steve said. “How many fishermen can say they fought over a giant blue marlin with a pack of oceanic sharks?”

  Randy didn’t look all that pleased, though. I knew he wanted that fish.

  He nodded to me. “Let’s put her to bed.”

  After Randy and I moored and cleaned the boat, Dad took us all out to dinner. The eight of us sat at a big round table at Huggo’s restaurant, right by the sea, with small waves thumping up under the floor beneath our feet.

  Even though we’d lost the marlin, for Randy it was still about as perfect as a day could get.

  A few weeks later he came home from JohnnyBoy’s Red-Top babashop with a bowling-ball head.

  Army-style.

  “Might as well do it now and get it right, ah?”

  His new look had us all rolling, especially Mama, who said, “You look like a porpoise.” Dad just smiled and leaned up against him, proud as a peacock. I rubbed my hand over the stubble on his head. “Feels like pig’s hair.”

  He punched me in the arm, grinning. “At least I no get pig’s breath like you, ah?”

  He left for the army two days later, bald as a mango.

  “What are you two boys going to do without each other to get into trouble with?” Mama said while we all stood around at the airport.

  “I don’t know about this pantie,” Randy said, crooking his arm around my neck. “But me, I’m going to see some action.”

  “Pshh! You dreaming, bro. The only action you going see is a drill sergeant giving you hundret push-ups for being ugly.”

  Randy shoved me away, then stuck out his hand to shake. I took it, and Randy squeezed as hard as he could, but he couldn’t make me flinch. “Not bad,” he said. “Maybe the army will take you after all.”

  The army.

  I knew it was coming at me, the same as it came at Randy. You had no choice. Uncle Sam called and you went. Some guys ran away to Canada. I read about that in the paper. But how could they do that and leave everything and everyone they knew behind?

  Still, the world was getting to be a scary place.

  I’d never heard of Vietnam before the war started. Then strange new words started popping up every week, on TV, the radio, and in the papers—Viet Cong, Saigon, Haiphong, the Mekong Delta.

  Though I could hardly imagine any of it, a wave of prickles fluttered down my spine whenever someone spoke of Southeast Asia. Like Randy, Vietnam was something I would have to face, too.

  And soon.

  Randy wrote to Dad and Mama several times from boot camp and a couple of times from the war zone, usually with a short note to me at the end of each letter. But the last letter anyone got from him was addressed to me alone.

  He started out telling me about an operation in the village of Tan Yuen, then wandered off into whatever was passing through his mind, the whole letter in one long paragraph.

  . . . A guy in my squad died yesterday. He took a spray of bullets in his lungs, less than ten yards away from where I hid in the brush. I held him, propped his head up on my knees—he was lying in the dirt, alone—there was nobody there for him but me. He stared up and said, “Please—” Then he died. This is a cruel country, Jake. Don’t ever come here. There are scorpions, and cobras as deadly as the Cong. I’d like to napalm them all, hit everything that moves with Sky Raiders and Phantom jets. I’m not on earth, I’m in Hell. It’s 120 degrees and everything stinks. This is a pitiful place. I can’t even laugh anymore. Who cares, anyway?

  The letter was wrinkled, as if he’d stuffed it into his pocket a time or two, and he’d written with a dull pencil, the words smudging into each other toward the end.

  I walked down to the ocean with my dogs and sat out on the rocks for a long time after reading that letter. It made my throat swell up and hurt, and I didn’t really know why. Maybe it was because I’d never heard Randy talk like that before, sounding so . . . empty.

  I should have kept that letter, I guess. Just because it was something he wrote, a memory, a piece of his life. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I burned it in the trash dump out behind our house and never showed it to anyone.

  Not long after that a man drove up our rocky driveway in a white four-door Plymouth. It had been raining for two days straight, and mud was caked all over the tires and wheel wells of his car.

  Dad was o
ut on a charter.

  Mama was in the house working on a new quilt, and I was sitting out on the porch watching the rain and playing my guitar, a dreary, lazy day.

  My three dogs went off the second they heard the car drive up, running out and whisking around it, leaping up to see in the window.

  I put the guitar down and called to them.

  The man waited in the car until they settled down to an excited whine.

  Mama came out onto the porch and stood next to me.

  The man got out and hurried through the rain and shoe-sucking mud to the porch with his hat crooked under his elbow. Raindrops freckled his khaki uniform, spreading into dark splotches as he ducked through the waterfall overflowing our gutter.

  “Wow,” he said. “When it rains around here, it rains. Good morning, ma’am.” Then he nodded to me, saying, “Son.”

  He hesitated a moment, glancing over his shoulder at the clods of mud he’d tracked up onto the porch.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Mama said. “Those dogs bring more mud up onto this porch than any of us ever could.”

  He nodded, half-smiled. “Is this the home of Mr. Calvin Liu?”

  “He’s my husband, yes.”

  The rain pummeled the mud and trees around the house with a constant shhhhhh, making it so you almost had to shout to be heard.

  “Come inside,” Mama said.

  “No, no, I’m—I’m too muddy. My name is Decker, Corporal Decker, United States Army. I’m here about . . . your son.”

  Mama gasped and stiffened, and that scared me, I mean, really scared me. I’d been diving and seen sharks lurking in the same water as me; I’d faced wild boars up in the rain forest hunting with Dad; and I’d felt the earth quake violently beneath my feet. But none of it made my heart stop the way Mama did.

  “Is Mr. Liu home?”

  Mama shook her head.

  Time seemed to vanish, every nerve in my body suddenly alert and on hold.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, ma’am. Your son has sustained a fairly serious injury.”

  Mama’s hand flew to her chest, and he quickly added, “He’s okay, he’s doing fine. . . . It’s just . . . well, let me explain.”

  I touched Mama’s back. Heat bled into my fingers through the thin material. She fell into her chair, the one next to Dad’s, where they’d shared a thousand red sunsets. She closed her eyes.

  Corporal Decker said, “He was with his platoon near Da Nang, crossing a grassy field. The boy in front of him stepped on a trap and was killed. Shrapnel hit Private Liu’s leg, just below the knee, and he lost the small finger on his left hand. But the leg . . . the leg was shattered . . . it had to come off, from the knee down.”

  Oh, no, I thought. No, no, no.

  Corporal Decker spoke softly, with a warm, comforting accent. When Mama started to cry, he took his hat from under his elbow and held it in his hands. Rain drummed on the metal roof of the house and splattered down to muddy puddles in thin waterfalls. Corporal Decker glanced toward Dad’s chicken coops, but caught himself and apologized. “Your place reminds me of home.”

  He put his hat back under his elbow. “Your son is doing fine, Mrs. Liu. He’s at the 249th General Hospital in Tokyo. He’ll be coming home as soon as he’s well enough to travel.”

  Then, after a pause, he added, “If there’s one thing I believe, it’s that there’s no adversity a soldier can’t overcome if he’s lucky enough to have people who care about him at home. Some don’t.”

  Before he left, Mama took his hand and praised him for having the courage to do a job as difficult as his.

  “Yes, ma’am, it’s a hard thing, all right. But when I see that a boy has something to come home to, it makes it a whole lot easier.”

  Corporal Decker tipped his head and said again that he was sorry and that he’d be in touch. The army would help Randy rehabilitate, he said. “But first he needs to come to terms with his loss . . . that’s the hardest part.”

  After he’d gone, Mama and I sat side by side on the porch for a long time without speaking. Then, through her tears, Mama brought up every foolish thing Randy had ever done in his life.

  On a hot, blue-sky day more than five weeks later, Randy came home. Mama started crying when he appeared, leaning on a pair of crutches at the top of the stairs leading down from the plane.

  Dad hurried out to help him down. Randy hooked his left arm over Dad’s neck and held the crutches in his free hand. The left pant leg on his uniform was folded up and pinned short.

  We were all there—me, Dad, Mama, and a busload of other people.

  Randy nodded and smiled and glanced around quickly through watery eyes. His face was thinner, with cheeks that curved inward. His hair had grown back but was cut short and trimmed close around his ears.

  When he saw me pushing in, his eyes brushed by, as if embarrassed. I put three strands of sweet-smelling maile around his neck and gave him a quick hug.

  I tapped the side of his arm. “Some people will do anything to get out of the army.”

  Randy ducked his chin. “Yeah,” he said softly.

  When we’d given him all the leis we’d made for him, you could hardly see his face.

  It wasn’t until after sunset that evening that I finally got a chance to be alone with him. I caught him slipping away from the house and all the people who’d stopped by to see him.

  He hobbled down to the chicken coops on his crutches, my dogs sweeping the grounds around him. The chickens were sleeping, the yard quiet and peaceful in the still evening air. Randy leaned up against the wooden fence.

  I approached from the side and spoke softly so I wouldn’t startle him. “Twenty-six of them now. Dad got that red rooster a couple of weeks ago.”

  Randy made a low scoffing sound. “Where I was, these things walk around the place like dogs.”

  We both stared at the shadowy chickens in the dark coop. The cool night air sharpened the iron-rich smells rising out of the earth. The dogs sniffed around a few minutes, then headed back up to the house.

  “How about I cut school tomorrow,” I said. “We can go fishing out past the airport—take a cooler, spend a few hours.”

  His shoulders jiggled, laughing silently.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You want to go fishing—what a joke!”

  “Huh?”

  “A joke, I said!” He spat the word.

  He took one of his crutches and slammed it against the fence. All twenty-six chickens rose up squawking and fluttering. Randy hit the fence again, and then threw the crutch into the mud.

  He raised the other crutch to throw that, too, but I caught his arm. “Randy, stop!”

  “What do you know about it, ah? Nothing, you don’t know nothing.”

  Just then Dad came jogging down from the house. “What’s going on out here? I heard the chickens.”

  Randy yanked his arm out of my grip. Dad looked at the crutch lying in the mud.

  Randy turned away, hopping on one foot, then with the remaining crutch, made his way back to the house. I picked up the crutch in the mud.

  “Damn,” Dad whispered. “If I could just do something . . . anything.”

  I wiped mud off the crutch, then scraped my fingers on the fence. “All I did was ask him if he wanted to go fishing.”

  Up ahead Randy skirted the front porch and went around back, probably to sneak into his room unseen. I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t be in the mood for all those people, either.

  Dad put his arm across my shoulders as we walked back up to the house. “It’s not your fault, Jake. And Randy knows that. He’s just . . . I don’t know. Damn war.”

  War.

  The word alone caused the hair on my neck to prickle. It was growing larger every day, bearing down on me, dark on the horizon—the mysterious names of each new Vietnamese town now carrying images of shredded jungles, charred villages, and boys my age without legs.

  And I’d soon be asked to go there.


  Dad and I sat out on the porch. “Remember old man Nakamura?” he said.

  I nodded, staring out into the dark night.

  “Lost every finger on his right hand when some monster fish grabbed the small tuna he had on his hand line. Cut ’um right off—one, two, three, four.”

  I winced. I knew the story, but still it made me sick to think of it.

  “But after his hand healed, he went right on fishing like always. He just had to learn new ways to get the line up, that’s all.”

  Dad sat silently a moment, as if he’d said it all to himself. Then he added, “Randy will figure something out.”

  “I still can’t believe he lost a leg. . . .”

  After a moment Dad said, “I don’t suppose he can either, son.”

  After school I usually found Randy sitting alone on the porch with his .22 caliber rifle. Once, as I walked up our rocky drive, he shot and wounded a dove. It flopped around in the dirt down near the chicken coops. He shot at it five or six times before it stopped flipping.

  The dogs, who’d run out to greet me, scurried back under the house.

  “What did you do that for?” I said, walking up.

  “Do what, brother?”

  “Shoot the bird.”

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t like the way he said “brother,” kind of spitting it with glazed, lifeless eyes. I may as well have been some annoying tourist. “You’ve never shot birds in your life,” I said.

  “Well, now I can, ah? Got plenty time.”

  Randy stood the rifle butt on his hip, barrel to the sky, finger on the trigger guard.

  Then he held the rifle out to me. “Take a shot, little bro. See if you can hit it. Already dead, ah? So you won’t hurt it.”

  I started into the house. “I don’t shoot birds, dead or alive. I got things to do.”

  Randy lowered the rifle and turned toward the dead bird. He raised it again and aimed with one hand. A puff of dust exploded a few feet away from the lifeless dove.

  Three weeks later the Iwalani sat alongside the pier, riding the slow wide swells that moved into the harbor and thumped up against the seawall. The sky was clear and the water blue-green in the afternoon sun. Dad was on board, working on the engine.