Freckled

by T W Neal

  I’m not sure why everybody keeps saying this is paradise. I still like Oahu better.

  Chapter Eight

  Jungle Christmas

  Forest House reading with Mom, me, Bonny, and Awa

  Age: 7, Haena, Kauai, 1972

  Christmas approaches, and we decorate the classroom with cut out snowmen and Santas made of construction paper with cotton balls glued on. We’re learning the Twelve Days of Christmas, memorizing the traditional song. I’ve never seen a partridge, or a pear tree, or a turtledove, or a French hen, or a lord a-leaping, but I like to imagine what they might be.

  Even Minka and I like the “Hawaiian Style” Twelve Days of Christmas better, and Mrs. Harada accompanies us singing both songs on her ukulele as we practice for our Christmas program. I’m learning to speak pidgin like the locals, and this song is fun because we aren’t usually allowed to speak pidgin in class.

  Numbah Twelve day of Christmas, my tutu give to me

  Twelve television, eleven missionary, ten can of beer, nine pound of poi, eight ukulele, seven shrimp a-swimmin', six hula lesson, five steenkin' peeg, foah flowah lei, t’ree dried squid, two coconut, An' one mynah bird in one papaya tree!*

  And then, really huge packages arrive at the post office from Gigi and Grandpa Jim just in time for Christmas. The boxes are so big they have to be kept outside on the porch. I can hardly stand it; I’m so excited to see what’s inside them.

  We decorate our house by covering the little Norfolk pine Pop dug up and put in a pot with strings of popcorn, but the ants are so bad we have to take the popcorn down. So, we make strings of Job’s tears and hale koa seeds instead. The hale koa seeds grow in flat brown pods on scrubby, tough little trees along the roadside, and we just pull over to pick the pods.

  A fiber on the side of the pod, like the zipper on a sleeping bag, pulls down to open the pod and reveal, inside, a neat row of shiny brown kernels the size and shape of sunflower seeds. On our way back from our town runs we stop and pick the purplish-gray, fingertip-sized Job’s tears from where they grow among the sharp-edged clumps of bright green grass, usually beside one of the irrigation ditches used to water the sugar cane fields which cover most of Kauai.

  We sit in the lamplight in the evenings and punch through the hale koa seeds’ tough shells with a needle. I like the way three brown koa seeds look with one silvery Job’s tear, and make that my pattern as Mom, Bonny, and I each work on a different strand.

  Another day we make decorations to hang on the tree from an idea Mom has—a puka shell with flat toothpicks coming out like rays, and another puka shell glued on top of the toothpicks to make a star.

  I get frustrated with making the stars. The glue is too runny, and the toothpicks fall out before they can set, making me grumpy and ready to throw things.

  “Slow down. Be patient. Do one side, balance the toothpicks, and when the glue has set a bit, put the other puka shell on.” Mom leans in to show me, and I inhale her smell: sweet darkness of hash, her favorite thing to smoke, coconut oil, and sweat. Her smell is a beloved tender nose-prickling that always makes me want to press in close. Pop smells different: heavier, darker, and always the tang of the ocean.

  Bonny, age three, has a sweet milky smell even though she doesn’t nurse anymore. She makes her own ornaments by filling one side of a clam with glue and dropping little shells in. Her way looks easier, and I decide to make a Baby Jesus with a clam shell, a variation on what she’s doing.

  Mom spends hours walking the beach and picking up shells while I’m at school and Bonny’s at Mommy School, a babysitting co-op she set up with some other moms at Taylor Camp. This means there are a lot of shells to choose from in the cookie tray where Mom has rinsed them and left them out in the sun a few days to make sure all the hermit crabs and algae have died.

  I find a pale, freckled clam shell and make the Baby Jesus out of the round, blank “door” of a turban shell and a black-spotted cone for his body “wrapped in swaddling clothes.” Baby Jesus comes out so great that I decide to make the whole Jesus family. Mother Mary is a cone shell balanced on “feet” of a broken fragment of cowrie, her head a nice round pink puka shell with a veil of another carefully selected cone shell fragment, this one so worn by surf and sea it’s a gentle violet. Papa Joseph is much the same construction but with brighter colors.

  “Toby, these are wonderful. You’re making a crèche set!” Mom always calls it a crèche set instead of a Nativity because she went to school in Switzerland. My grandpa, Dr. Garth Murphy, was a famous marine biologist and the world expert on sardines for a long time, so Mom grew up on Oahu where he worked for the University of Hawaii. My grandparents knew the rich and famous scientist Linus Pauling and his family as friends, and when she was fourteen, Mom went and lived with the Pauling family in Switzerland and was their au pair. That’s why she crosses her sevens with a little line, too.

  Mom and Pop call themselves “spiritual,” not religious. They believe Jesus was a great teacher, along with Buddha and Yogananda, a guru from India whose teachings they like. We also don’t do Santa in our family. “Begin with a lie and then add commercialism” is Pop’s opinion on Santa. I am careful not to tell any other kids he’s fake, though. Other kids get to believe in him if their families want.

  Pop’s learning guitar, plunking on his chords in the background next to his own glass lamp. The quiet concentration of the shell project and the sound of his music fill me with happiness, swelling inside me until my skin is tight, a balloon blown up just right.

  Even though there’s no Santa, Mom and Pop like the stocking idea, and when Christmas comes at last, we hang the fabric stockings Mom sewed at the Rocky Point house from nails on the wall. Bon’s and mine are both a bright, crazy Hawaiian print with little bells sewn around the top. The bells are already beginning to rust from the damp of the jungle. On Christmas morning, the stockings contain most of our presents, bulgy with treats like carob balls and licorice candy sticks from Ambrose’s, a box of maple sugar leaves, a store-bought orange so bright it hurts—all the way from Florida. A glorious pen and watercolor set are wedged in with a new flashlight in mine.

  I chew my fingernails, waiting to open those big boxes on the porch as we go through a strict present-opening process with agonizing slowness: each person opens a gift by age, and no matter how small, we all witness and exclaim before we can go on to another one.

  Finally, Bonny and I can open the gifts outside from Gigi and Grandpa Jim. Pop uses his Swiss Army knife to slit the wrapping and reveal the box inside of the one with my name on it. I clasp my hands and hop up and down with excitement. “It’s from Sears!”

  When Pop strips the box away, a hot pink bike is revealed. A woven plastic basket with pink plastic flowers attaches to handlebars decorated with glittery plastic streamers, and a swooping, glitter-embedded rubber banana seat invites me to hop on.

  “I love it!” I shriek, loudly, and glance over at Pop. His face tells me it’s okay to be loud because it’s Christmas, and he is already cutting into the second box to reveal a smaller bike in an aqua color with training wheels, for Bonny. We both hold hands and hop up and down, yelling with happiness. I don’t know how to ride a two-wheeler, but I can hardly wait to try.

  Mom’s mouth is pinched, and her eyes are sad as she picks up the flower-decorated front basket of my bike. She usually doesn’t like the presents Gigi sends us, so I feel bad that I like them so much.

  “Lots of plastic,” she murmurs. She doesn’t like plastic, never has. Says it rapes the earth.

  I don’t understand what that means.

  What I know about plastic is that it doesn’t rust when everything else metal rusts in the jungle, and it doesn’t swell and get squeaky and split like wood things do here. Black mold can grow on plastic, though, and I know that mold will grow on my plastic flowers unless the bike is covered up—but the flowers will last. They will probably last longer than the rest of the bike.

  Mom’s sadness is oozing out t
oday, and I hug her, and whisper in her ear. “My pen set is the best present of all. Thank you.”

  She’s begun to be sad a lot lately, and sometimes hours go by where she stares at the tops of the trees and doesn’t say anything. I want to cheer her up, so I give her a kiss. I really do like the pen set; it’s only a little bit of a lie. She puts her arms around me and squeezes me hard.

  Pop mutters over the little bags of screws and the tiny-printed assembly instructions, but it’s only an hour or so later that I’ve got that hot pink bike positioned at the top of the sloping, boulder-strewn, bush-choked path as it leads past the house and toward the beach.

  Mom and Bonny stand behind us, and Bonny can already sit up straight on her bike with the training wheels, though it’s a little big for her. My bike actually had some too, but I wouldn’t let Pop put them on—I’m ready to roll, the faster the better. Pop holds me upright with the little handle on the back of the banana seat as I get on and put my feet on the pedals.

  “I’ll hold you up and run alongside,” he says. I wonder how he can with all the bushes beside the rocky trail, but I don’t care. My heart is pounding and I’m itching to GO.

  “Push me,” I command. He does.

  I wobble and weave down the trail, picking up speed with Pop running behind. Mom and Bonny yell encouragement. It’s like I’m flying, and it’s amazing!

  Suddenly I realize I’m going really fast and have no idea how to slow down.

  Pop trips over some vegetation and lets go. I’m roaring down the slanting, bumpy dirt path, trying to dodge the rocks and shrieking with delighted terror. I’m heading into the stand of Java plum trees at the end of our clearing when I lose balance and crash into a lantana bush.

  I’m winded and scratched as I try to crawl out of the prickly bush. My bike lies in the path, tires spinning, already getting smeared with red Kauai dirt. Pop runs over and picks me up to see if I’m okay. My knees have hit something and are scraped, lantana thorns tangle my hair, but I’m panting with excitement. “Let’s do it again!”

  And so, we do. Again and again, until I’m careening down that forest trail all the way to the ocean and making the Taylor Camp kids jealous.

  “Barbie doll,” one of the hippie moms calls me, but I don’t care because I know everyone’s just jealous of my beautiful hot pink bike. I teach Minka to ride my bike too, and we take turns crashing into trees and rocks.

  It’s a very good Christmas.

  Chapter Nine

  Don’t Go with Strangers

  In the van, still sucking my thumb

  Age: 7, Tunnels Beach, Kauai, 1972

  Mom discovered at the meeting with Mr. Beck to give him my extra clothing and discuss “how I’m adjusting” that I only legally have to be in school three days a week.

  So that’s all the days I go because I hate the hassling and the bus ride so much. “You’re smart, Toby. If you stay home, you’ll have to make up for those two days a week on your own,” Mom says.

  “No problem,” I tell her. I can already read books in the sixth-grade reading section easily, and while I don’t like math as much, I have no problem keeping up with the boring worksheets Miss Harada gives us.

  One non-school day, we drive into town while Pop’s at work and do our usual: go to Ambrose’s health food store, Big Save for kerosene for the lamps, and then stop by Kapa`a Library for books.

  On the way back to the Forest House, Bonny’s fussy and tired so Mom pulls up at Tunnels Beach. It’s still our favorite beach, great for fishing, surfing when the waves are good, and finding puka shells.

  Mom and Bon take a nap on the bed in the van while I put on the bottoms of my swimsuit, pick up my red scoop net, and go out to the reef where I once caught an octopus.

  The wind’s beginning to settle in late afternoon, and the tide is fairly low with hardly any surf—good conditions for reef picking. “Surfers and fishermen study the ocean like Mainland people study the weather on land,” Pop says.

  The great golden length of beach is empty; the towering peak of Makana Mountain that the tourists call Bali Hai looks near enough to touch. The sea outside the skirt of reef is aqua and Prussian blue, two of my favorite watercolor hues. I like matching the fancy color names on tubes of paint, to the shades of real things I see.

  I hunt over the reef with my net, walking light on the balls of my feet, careful of tube worms. On the reef and while fishing, I can be quiet and move slow, which is hard for me other times. I keep my shadow behind me and my eyes scanning for movement.

  I spot something—that surge and pump in the water that means an octopus is hiding in this hole. I circle around, my heart speeding up as I try to get a look at it under a big rock in the middle of a tide pool. The rock’s big, the tide pool’s deep. I’m going to have to climb in and grab for it blind—only I can tell by the surge that this octopus’s at least as big as the other one. Now that I know about the snapping bill in the middle, I don’t want to just grab and hope for the best like last time.

  I glance up, scan around, and spot a local boy walking on the beach carrying a fishing pole. His stringer of fish, surf trunks, and tabis tell me he knows fishing and the reef. I trot to the sand, practically hopping with excitement, waving my net to get his attention. “Hey! I found a tako under that rock over there. Can you help me get it?”

  He’s brown and tall as he looks down at me, his dark eyes a secret glitter under a mass of thick black hair sorting itself into curls and hanks. His lean body isn’t fully grown yet; he’s still a teenager but looks capable. “Show me, haole girl.”

  I lead the way to the big rock and he squats and investigates. “Yeah. One big tako. We need my spear. I live right across the street; let’s go get it.”

  “Okay.” I follow him back to the beach. I’m curious to see his house—I know a few of the kids that live up there from the bus, but not to speak to since they usually call me haole crap or fucking haole or, on a good day, dirty hippie. I don’t remember ever seeing this boy, though. He’s too old for our school. He called me haole, but not in a bad way. Just like describing something, and I’m fine with that. I am a haole, after all.

  I glance over at the van, which is a long way off. It’s too far to run to tell Mom where I’m going. We’ll be back before she ever needs to know I went anywhere.

  We walk up the beach into young ironwood trees. Ipomoea vines, with their purple morning glory flowers, trip me, and the boy takes my hand and helps me up, the fishing pole in his other hand. “Just a little further.”

  He’s being so nice, even holding my hand. I probably go to school with his little brothers and sisters who hate me. He leads me to where a path heads into the vacant lot separating the beach from the road. The houses are just on the other side of the road, in clusters and clumps like hens with chicks, several of them as small as our Forest House. They’re separated by grass, and parked boats, and lots of pickup trucks.

  “I want to show you something.” The boy tugs me off the path into the ironwoods.

  A prickle of alarm—his hand has gone clammy, and I smell something sharp coming from his skin. I try to get my hand away, but he doesn’t let go. He pulls me forward and stops at an open spot surrounded by ironwoods. “I want to show you something,” he says again.

  “What?” Curious. I’ve always been too curious.

  “Kneel.”

  “No. I don’t want to.”

  He pushes me on the top of the head, forcing me down, and I kneel.

  I’m really worried now, and glance around for help or how to get away, but I can’t see anything or anybody but the green of the ironwood saplings and the strange glitter of the boy’s eyes as he opens his surf trunks. “Have you seen one of these?”

  “Yeah. All the time.” His root is a slightly different color than Pop’s or the other men at Taylor Camp, but it’s nothing unusual.

  He frowns. He doesn’t like what I said. Does he think he’s showing me something special? His eyes are hard and shiny as
kukui nuts on one of those tourist leis. “Have you seen it do this?”

  I look. His root is getting bigger and bigger as I stare at it, and my eyes widen. “No.”

  “Kiss it.” His voice is gravelly. He grabs a handful of my hair and pulls me closer.

  His hand in my hair hurts, and I don’t like the smell of him. “No, I don’t want to.”

  “Kiss it, or I’ll get my spear and come after you—and your family. While you’re sleeping, fucking haole crap.”

  He hates me. I hear it in his voice, and now I’m really scared. I look up and his eyes are squinty and mean.

  I kiss his root. It smells funny, but it’s not too gross.

  But that’s not enough.

  He makes me put it in my mouth and tells me if I bite him he’ll hit me. His hands are twisted up in my hair to control me. I keep my eyes closed, shutting out the way things look. Trying to shut out the strange musky smell and the sounds too, trying to shut out how I feel, how what’s in my mouth is choking me. But I can’t shut out thoughts of him hurting us, and he’s holding my hair too tight, and I can’t breathe. I start to cry, snorting and snuffling with his root in my mouth, because I’m scared of him spearing us at night, in our beds.

  I choke and spit when he’s done with whatever he’s doing.

  His root is gone. He pets my head and seems to feel bad. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. Stop crying.”

  I’m still kneeling, and I finally open my eyes. Everything is fuzzy from crying. He squats down so that he’s close to my face, and he kisses me, which seems really strange since he hates me so much. He pets my hair some more, like I’m a cat, smoothing it down my bare back.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay, I’m sorry,” he says. It’s not okay. But I can tell he’s trying to make me feel better somehow, and I let him hold me close.