Freckled

by T W Neal

  “That wasn’t so bad, right?” Knight’s panting a little because I made him haul my dead weight, keeping my eyes shut and going totally limp. I didn’t want to chance him cutting me, and I’m just glad that he’s not pretending to skin me, too. I stand up, rubbing at the mud on my arms and legs and scratches from the sharpened stakes.

  “Don’t tell the parents.” He squints blue-green eyes.

  “I’m not a baby.” I squint right back.

  “Okay then. Now let’s do a snare trap. I’m going to hang a loop of rope off a branch and you can walk into it. I’ll catch you with it, and haul you up into the tree.”

  Knight’s nicer to me as time goes on because I pass his repeated tests of bravery and friend-worthiness, and I’m even excited when he says one day, “I’ve got something cool to show you. We have to hurry or we’ll miss it.”

  Knight leads me, Bonny, and Royal into the jungle behind the Ham Youngs’ house. “Where are we going?” I whisper. The younger kids are behind me, and I’m getting really worried because I’m responsible for them. The Ham Youngs are serious locals. We’ll get lickins for sure if we get caught sneaking around on their land.

  “They’re getting ready for a luau. Seriously, this is cool.” Knight pushes me through some dense bushes toward a fenced area.

  I hear a lot of hollering. A strange grunting and squeaking. Then, a terrible, high-pitched screaming—a woman is being attacked! Some awful crime is being done, and I’m about to see it. My heart is drumming so hard that I’m dizzy as Knight drags me forward by the arm.

  Still screened behind some bushes, I peek into the large wooden pen we’ve arrived at.

  Two brawny local men and a teenage boy, all stripped to the waist, are chasing a huge black and white spotted pig around the pen. It’s as big as a sofa, and they’ve roped it by one foot. The pig’s objecting, loudly, punctuated by the yelling and swearing of the men. Only one hind leg is captured by the lasso, but that seems to be enough to slow it down because it finally stops, and one of the men runs up and whacks the pig on the head with a leather mallet. The blow makes a hollow thump like dropping a melon, but doesn’t do anything but make the pig scream even louder.

  The little kids are crowded against me, their eyes as big as tennis balls. We’re going to get in so much trouble if anyone catches us! I try to pull back, turn away, but Knight has his hand on the back of my neck.

  “Watch!” he hisses in my ear, squeezing my neck hard. “I thought you weren’t chicken.”

  I watch.

  They whack the pig repeatedly, cursing, but it keeps darting and squalling, knocking the men aside with its big head, slamming them into the sides of the pen. Suddenly, one of the men darts forward, and a blade in his hand slashes deep into the pig’s neck.

  Blood fountains and sprays over the men’s half-naked bodies. It smells like licking a penny.

  The pig’s screaming goes on and on, until finally it begins to drown in gurgles and wet sobs.

  I remember how it felt to have a knife against my throat. Now I know what it looks like when something dies that way.

  The great beast folds its tiny hooves and finally keels over.

  I want to look away but can’t. I want to retch but can’t. I glance down at my sister and put my arm over her. Bonny’s eyes are huge, and her face is greenish.

  “Cool, isn’t it?” Knight says. We don’t say anything.

  The men work the lasso around the pig’s other hoof, tighten the loop, and toss the rope over a crossbar over the pen. The three of them, hauling on the rope, pull the pig so that it’s hanging from its hind feet, swaying and massive. The man with the knife puts a white paint bucket underneath its head, then stabs it deeper in the neck. More blood gushes out, filling the bucket.

  My eyes feel burned, as if I’ve stared too long at the sun—I haven’t blinked since the whole horror show started.

  After the blood bucket is filled, the knife man stabs the pig in the belly, and like when I gut a fish, saws from its hindquarters to under its front legs. The intestines spring out like pressurized stuffing, along with reek of blood and shit.

  I’ve had enough and turn away, pulling Bonny with me—and this time Knight lets me go. The little kids break loose and run past us up to the house.

  “Are they going to tell?” Mom and Pop wouldn’t like it that I let Bonny see something like that.

  “Royal knows better than to tell, and your sister better not,” Knight says matter-of-factly, cracking his knuckles.

  “She won’t.” I hope. But I bet we have to sleep together tonight from the nightmare.

  “You can see my fort,” Knight says graciously, since I haven’t barfed and didn’t run away until the very end. “I built it myself.”

  “Okay.” I’ve never had an idea Knight would even consider, and this sounds relatively fun and harmless out of the selection of activities he’s offered so far.

  “This way.” He leads me down the dirt road, and over to a good-sized guava tree. Pieces of wood, listing to and fro, are nailed to its trunk. Knight climbs, and I follow. Up, and up, and up.

  Finally, sitting side by side on a one-by-four board nailed to branches at the top of the tree, we look out across Wainiha and the river mouth and the big sandbar, all the way to the ocean.

  “I can check the surf from here.” Knight already surfs with Darren out at Hanalei Bay and, even though he’s just a ten-year-old, people already talk about how good he is. We stare out at the ocean. I hold the board I’m sitting on so hard my fingers hurt because it’s swaying in the wind and there’s nothing else to hang onto.

  “Blown out,” I say, referring to the surf conditions.

  “It’s only glassy in the mornings.” He’s condescending.

  “I know that.” I don’t surf yet, but I do everything else in the water, and I resent his attitude. “This is a pretty boring fort. There’s nothing to do up here.”

  He narrows eyes the color of sea ice at me. “I’ve got something else for us to do.”

  Uh-oh. Now I’ve pissed him off.

  I follow Knight as he shinnies back down and lopes back to the house. I wait outside while he goes in and gets something. My heart speeds up when I see it’s a gun.

  “It’s just a BB gun.” Knight smiles and cocks it, leaning it on his shoulder like an old-time cowboy, then swinging it down to point at me. “You scared?”

  “No,” I lie. I can imagine him shooting me with it, can actually feel the sting of the BB pellets. “But I’m kind of tired. I think I’ll see what the parents are doing.” I can hear their voices, their laughter, even smell a little pakalolo on the air coming from the front porch.

  Knight clamps a hand around my arm. “C’mon. You’ll like this.”

  I seriously doubt it.

  This time we go down the rutted, potholed dirt road toward our house. Because it’s wet Wainiha, the potholes are mud puddles right now. Knight jumps into them with both bare feet and splashes me. I do it back, and he laughs. We splash and laugh that way until we get to a vacant lot, and it’s the closest thing to fun I’ve ever had with him.

  At the vacant lot, Knight swishes through the damp grass ahead of me to where a low barrier of sawhorses surrounds a very deep pit, at least fifteen feet straight down into raw red dirt, filled with water at the bottom.

  I pull back, afraid of being pushed into the hole in some parody of Tiger Hunt. I’d never get out. I try to act casual as I peer from a distance. “What’s this hole?”

  “It’s a cesspool for when they build the house on this property.” Knight rests his BB gun on one of the sawhorses. “See the toads?” He points down into the pit. “This is target practice. One point if you hit the toad, two for a leg, and three if you get one in the eye.”

  I look over the sawhorse.

  Hundreds of toads splash and croak in the water at the bottom of the pit.

  I love toads and often play with them, putting them in little corrals made of sticks and pretending they’re
fairy broncos, or trying to race them with Bonny. The silly creatures come out and sit in the road after rains, so the streets are often covered with big brown squashed toads with their guts coming out of their mouths from the cars running over them.

  Their eyes remind me of the octopus I caught—sparkly bronze and intelligent.

  Knight takes aim and shoots into the pit. “Two points!” he crows. “Your turn.” He pushes the gun into my hands.

  I take it reluctantly. “I don’t know how.”

  He takes the BB gun back, cocks it for me, hands it to me. “Point and shoot. Nothing to it. Like shooting toads in a barrel.” He laughs.

  “I don’t want to.”

  Knight’s eyes get narrow and his mouth thins out. He seems to get bigger right in front of me. “You scared?”

  “No. I like toads, is all.”

  “Toby. Toady! Toby, Toady!” he chants. “I think that’s a great name for you. I bet the kids at school will think so, too.” He attends Hanalei School, and even though I’m homeschooling right now, this is a small island and the last thing I need is “Toady” catching on with the local kids.

  I step up to the sawhorse, and rack up twenty points with the BB gun before he finally lets me go home.

  Walking back to our house alone, I hate him for making me shoot the toads: poor helpless things, twitching and hopping and unable to escape.

  And I hate me, for letting him push me around as if I couldn’t escape, either.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Big Flood

  Pop's famous homemade canoe

  Age: 9, Wainiha, Kauai, 1974

  Winter’s come with its stormy surf and heavy rain, and Pop’s in one of his dark moods, and Mom’s begun forgetting things and staring into space. Pupil checks show that she’s smoking a lot of hash, and Pop is drinking daily.

  With the rain outside, there’s nowhere to get away to, and it’s hard to stay quiet all the time. One day when I’m singing in the morning while jump roping in the lean-to garage, Pop comes roaring out of the house, red-faced and furious. “I told you to shut up and be quiet!” He paddles me with Mom’s hairbrush, drags me into the house, and throws me onto my bed. I stifle the crying with a pillow and hear them fighting outside the door. Will Mom have to go to the Best Facility again?

  Bonny comes in from wherever she’d disappeared to while Pop was spanking me and climbs into bed with me. We snuggle, trying to tune out the yelling, and I read her a book.

  I wake up to the roar of rain on the old tin roof and stare out the window. It’s raining so hard it seems like we’re underwater, and the gray light of morning barely penetrates. Streams of water fly off the channels of the tin with such force it seems like we’re in our own personal waterfall.

  Mom’s muttering swear words and running around putting down pots to catch the drips. The rain goes on and on, even worse than usual, and the power goes out. Bon gets clingy, sucking her finger and hanging on Mom, but I just wonder if it’s going to get too dark to read. As long as I can read, I can get through anything. I put on my usual shorts and T-shirt, and Mom makes eggs at the gas stove with Bonny hanging onto her leg.

  Pop turns on the battery-operated Weather Radio, holding it against his ear to hear above the roar of water outside. “Sounds like it’s gonna flood.”

  I hear a familiar yell outside. Knight runs by our window, excitement in his voice cutting through the roar of the rain: “No school today! Hanalei School closed for flooding!”

  Darren must have had his Weather Radio on, too. Hanalei School closes at least once a year when the river overflows its banks and no one can cross the bridge—so the flooding must also be happening in Hanalei.

  “Let’s go see if the river’s coming up,” Pop says as we hurriedly finish eating. We put on our see-through plastic ponchos and the rubber boots that are critical to life in Wainiha. I can’t find mine so I put Mom’s windbreaker on over my shorts and tee shirt.

  When the rain backs off a bit, we walk to the front of the house—the part that’s the abandoned store. The flood is already fifty feet away, mowing a liquid path across the road and swirling around the supports of the houses across from us. I’ve never heard of a flood coming this close to the store before, in all the stories of Wainiha’s flooding. My heart speeds up and sweat breaks out inside Mom’s big parka, warming me up in my skimpy clothes.

  My friend the brown mare is tied in the vacant lot next to the river where it’s already flooded! I jog down the road, my heels rubbing in my damp boots, and get ahead of Pop in his big green slicker. It’s hard to see through the rain, but I can hear the mare, neighing and frightened, and when I spot her, the water’s above her knees.

  “Oh no!” I grab Pop’s arm. I’m afraid to walk deeper into the floodwater than midway up my knee-high boots—I can see the full force of the river just beyond the mare, roiling past in angry chocolate swirls studded with logs. “We have to move her!”

  “She’s not our horse.” Pop doesn’t want to get into the locals’ business, and the horse belongs to one of the local families. “Don’t remind them we’re here” has become our motto. So far it’s worked—we haven’t had the kind of trouble we hear still goes on elsewhere.

  The mare neighs again. The water’s still coming up, and she’s going to be swept away and drown, I’m just sure of it. “We have to move her. The locals will understand we did it to save her.” I push forward into the water. Water swirls up, filling my boots, cold and gritty. Every step is like trying to move with a cement block on my feet.

  “Shit,” Pop says, but he follows me.

  We get to the horse and I shush her, petting her nose. I hold her neck rope, past my knees in the flood, as Pop unties the stakeout rope from the guava tree she’s tied to. Once he has it undone, with me on one side and Pop on the other, we walk her toward dry ground. Mom and Bonny are standing on the dry area of the road, cheering us on.

  The brown water has completely filled and overflowed my knee-high boots, making walking in the water slow and clumsy—but the mare, frightened of what’s happening, breaks into a trot.

  “Whoa!” I tug on the rope around her neck, but it isn’t enough to slow her down. I trip and fall into the water, and it’s enough to frighten the mare into a full gallop. Pop yells as the rope burns through his hands.

  I get up out of the water, spitting and soaked from head to toe, as the mare gets out of the flood and gallops down the road, the rope flapping in against her flanks and scaring her even more.

  “Hope letting that horse go doesn’t get us in trouble,” Pop says. “We aren’t catching her now.”

  The rain slants down in cold, drilling pellets. I push my wet hair out of my face, shivering. My mouth tastes like salty dirt as I slosh toward dry ground, turning my head to watch trees and branches tumble by in a slow-motion dance as they move downriver. The twin metal bridges further back are still above the water, but hum with a high-frequency sound of strain.

  The flood’s broken the sandbar, and the river gushes into the ocean but swirls back because of waves churned up by the storm. Looking out to sea, the whole bay is a brown, churned-up expanse like foamy hot chocolate.

  A woman comes splashing from the deeper end of the road, bedraggled and panicky. “Help us! We’re stuck in our house!”

  The phones and electricity are out, and no rescue vehicles can get through the flooded areas between us and Hanalei, anyway. Other residents have begun joining us from the drier end of town, and the adults put their heads together and come up with a plan. Someone brings a rope, and the biggest men go to the front and wade in to lead us to the house. Knight is right in there behind the men, clearly thrilled to be helping, and gestures to me to come. I grab onto the rope, not about to be left behind, and become part of a human chain heading back to the woman’s house.

  As we approach, the floodwaters rise to my waist, sucking and cold. I’m barefoot, having taken off the useless boots, clinging to the rope with both hands. The current is st
rong, pulling me sideways, as we finally reach the woman’s driveway.

  The whole bottom floor of her house is flooded, but it’s a two-story, and two small children and the woman’s elderly mother are clustered at the top of the exterior stairs. Beside the house, their VW Bug bobs in the current, tied by its bumper to a sturdy guava tree.

  We walk the family all the way back to shallower water, passing them from person to person along the rope, and helping them to the dry part of the road.

  By then I’m shaking with cold and have poked my foot on something. Pop spots me in the rescue effort and yells at me from his place on the rope. “Go home, Toby, before you get swept out!”

  I slog back to the house reluctantly.

  Fortunately, the water’s stopped rising just short of the red gas pumps in front, and the pilot light hasn’t blown out on the water heater so I get to clean up in a hot shower. The house is steamy inside because Mom is fixing food, a huge pot of rice and bean stew, for the rescued people and neighbors who collect on the porch of the old store.

  Pop goes on to help with rescues all along the valley for the rest of the day. Cut off from any services by the flooding in Hanalei, it’s up to us to help each other. The usual barriers are suspended—there’s no rich or poor, local or haole. Just people helping each other survive and get through a crisis.

  As the water begins to go down, Pop and two other men comb the banks, looking for two babies who were swept out of their mothers’ arms as the women tried to escape a house further up in the valley.

  He gets home as the sun is going down.

  The rain has finally stopped. Foul mud and every kind of disturbed thing that the water plowing through the jungle has torn loose, has been deposited on the sandbar in giant mounds of rotting debris. At least ten cars are mixed in—most people didn’t think to tie their vehicles to trees, like that VW Bug. The air is dank and misty, full of so much water it’s like breathing rain, and reeks of mold and decay.