Freckled

by T W Neal

  Chapter Twenty

  The Josephson House

  Me napping

  Age: 10, Haena, Kauai, 1975

  The Josephsons’ seasonal summerhouse, our new rental, is the nicest place we’ve ever lived on Kauai: two stories, carpeted, with vaulted ceilings and a great big deck around the whole second story. Bonny and I each get our own room. The house even has a fenced yard with a kamani tree, and a tire swing with such an immensely long rope that riding on it feels like flying.

  Mom and Pop are excited because the house will pass muster with Gigi and Grandpa Jim, soon visiting. Pop has given up his fix-it business and got a job cooking at The Anchorage again, the steak-and-seafood restaurant within walking distance.

  “Just in the ‘Nick’ of time,” Pop says, making a pun. “Crack out the jeweled corks!”

  This phrase arose because Bonny asked our parents, back in La Jolla after one of those endless “lady lesson” country club dinners, “What do ladies do when they have to toot?”

  Pop’s answer, “They wear jeweled corks in their butts,” has become an ongoing joke. It’s funny, but I feel a little bad. Gigi doesn’t “get” us, but it seems like she cares in her bossy way. She’s never stopped sending packages and presents. Her last gift, a giant box of Crayolas, got eaten by cockroaches at our camp. She would not have found it funny like Mom and Pop did when they saw brightly colored cockroach droppings all over the tents and the cooking area.

  We buy non-camouflage clothes at the thrift store and settle into the strangeness of hot showers and flush toilets. I have trouble sleeping in a real bed without the sounds of the river and the trees all around me. I’m haunted by the drowned baby, by Francis’s crushed grave, by the way the tractors woke us up that last day, and I sneak in to sleep with Bonny night after night.

  I make a new friend in our neighborhood, Melanie Adams. Melanie’s the first girl I’ve met on Kauai besides myself to have red hair. We compare our colors: hers is a thick, wavy dark auburn. Mine is a straight, fine strawberry blond. And freckles: hers are big and patchy, the size of peppercorns and dimes. Mine, tiny as sand grains. It feels great to not be a “carrot top ginger freak haole” alone.

  Mel’s a little chubby and doesn’t climb trees or go fishing, but she has a great set of Barbies to play with in her family’s immaculate condo. Her mom always shoos us out, though.

  “Go outside and play!” she scolds. “Get a little exercise, Melanie!”

  There are no kids Bonny’s age nearby, so she tags along with us as we find ways to stay entertained outside. Melanie decides we should sneak into the Anchorage restaurant where our dad works and hers is the general manager.

  “I’ll show you how to get in,” Melanie says. Bonny and I glance at each other. Bon’s eyes, which vary depending on her mood, go as green as new leaves. I wonder what color mine are, and I suspect they’re almost as bright as hers at the naughtiness of this idea. We’ll get in so much trouble if we’re caught! But Melanie is the manager’s daughter—she can probably get us off.

  It’s morning, and the restaurant doesn’t open until eleven-thirty. Melanie leads us around the back of the restaurant past fruity-smelling, fly-buzzing dumpsters, to a gray metal door. The three of us squat, plastered against the back wall. Melanie looks around like Inspector Clouseau in polyester, checking to see if anyone’s around. I’m imagining my cloak of invisibility as Melanie reaches up and turns the doorknob. It turns easily, and the door swings open. It’s heavy, and she actually has to hop up and stop it from banging into a concrete block wall. She sneaks into the dim interior to look around; after all, Melanie can always pretend she’s looking for her dad, but we’ve already been told by ours we aren’t allowed to go over to the restaurant and bug him.

  She pokes her head out and gestures. “Coast is clear.”

  We scuttle inside. Dim and shadowy, steel counters and unfamiliar equipment gleam silver in the low light. The floors are covered with strange raised rubber flooring, full of holes, that sticks to our slippers. We follow Melanie’s plump square bottom through the cavern of the kitchen into the dining area.

  The space looks vast to me, the tables little islands of resined wood surrounded by chairs. In the distance, framed by plate glass windows, the ocean ripples like restless turquoise silk, trimmed in bright yellow beach and shaded by ironwoods and coconut palms.

  “I like to take sugar packets,” Melanie whispers. “But there’s other stuff too.” She shows us where these goodies are stashed in the waitress station. We stuff our pockets with sugar packets, saltines, tiny plastic vats of grape jelly, and foil-wrapped butter pats.

  My mouth is watering. We’re still on a strict no-sugar, no-refined products, no-meat diet. I’ve never really believed that these things that taste so delicious are badforyou. I wolf down the school hot dogs “chopped processed meat leftovers from a death factory” and the cubes of Jell-O “artificially colored horse hooves” with no difficulty.

  We sneak back out the way we came, rustling with stolen loot under our shirts and in our pockets, and sprint from the back of the restaurant into a nearby kamani grove. On the other side of the strip of majestic trees with their large, paddle-shaped leaves is a sandy-dirt road leading to a row of rich-people houses. Flushed with the rush of burglary, the three of us hunker down in the wide roots of one of the trees to enjoy the spoils of our raid.

  My favorite order for the sandwiches I construct is a saltine cracker with butter smeared on it, sugar sprinkled on the butter, and then another cracker with grape jelly on top of that. Silence reigns except for the crackle of the wrappers and the smacking of lips and licking of fingers. We eat everything we stole until there’s nothing left but the sugar packets, and then we rip the corners off those and pour them down our throats.

  Thoroughly bloated, we look around for what to do next. Melanie pulls a fistful of cardboard Anchorage Restaurant matchbooks out of her pocket. “Let’s make a fire.”

  “That’s dangerous,” I say automatically. After all those months camping under trees with a camp stove, I know fire is not to be played with.

  “Oh, come on. Don’t you want to see how these leaves burn?” Melanie holds up a red and brown leaf the size of a small skillet and fans herself with it. “Don’t be chicken.”

  I can never resist a dare. “Okay. But we have to clear an area around the fire so it doesn’t spread.” We make a pile of the leaves, scraping them together and leaving a six-inch leafless dirt circle around the pile.

  We each get a matchbook and light a leaf or two. I enjoy holding the stem of one of the leaves, holding the flame to the edge and watching the sharp and sour smoke curl up in graceful ribbons. I’m so busy lighting each leaf and watching it burn that I don’t realize the main leaf pile has exploded into a merry blaze until it’s too late.

  “What did you do?” I yell, as the flames leap and crackle. It’s so hot I can’t get close enough to scrape the dirt ring wider.

  “I just lit it,” Melanie says, her broad speckled forehead wrinkling in a frown. “I guess we should have brought some water to put it out.”

  “Or something to smother it.” I stomp on a finger of flame that’s made it into the surrounding leaves that form a thick mat under the trees.

  Bonny has withdrawn against the trunk of the tree. Her finger’s in her mouth where it goes when she’s scared, and her eyes are wide. I focus on running around the fire and stomping on the escaping flames, but my heart is thundering with terror. Melanie doesn’t seem to know what to do at all. “Stomp out the ones that are getting away!” I yell.

  It’s not working. The fire’s spreading, jumping over our narrow dirt band, so I rip my T-shirt off my head and start beating the flames with it. “Knock them out before they can spread!” I yell at the other girls.

  Just then a pickup truck pulls up beside us on the road and stops. Knight’s dad, large, intimidating surfing legend Darren Richardson, jumps out. He grabs a gallon jug of water and a beach towel out of the back
of his truck.

  “What the fuck are you girls doing?” he bellows in his booming voice, beating out the fire with the beach towel and throwing the water on the rest. Melanie and Bonny burst into tears and that means I can, too.

  “We didn’t realize it would get so big.” I put my T-shirt, burnt and holey, back on as I sniffle with the aftermath of fright.

  “You girls are in big trouble,” Darren says, putting his hands on his hips. “If you were my boys, you’d be getting lickins.”

  We all cry harder. Darren puts us all in the cab of the truck when he’s sure the fire’s out. He takes Melanie back to her mom first.

  Her mom, wearing pedal pushers and curlers, is shocked. She shoves Melanie inside, then turns back to face us. Hands on her hips, she declares, “I knew you hippies were a bad influence!”

  Melanie doesn’t say a word about how it was all her idea, and I give her a stink eye squint. I doubt her mom will let us play together any more.

  Darren drives us back to our house. Bonny and I get spankings with the back of Mom’s hairbrush, and lectures about fire too. I know we deserve it, and I’m glad that at least no one knows about us breaking into the Anchorage.

  Mom and Pop need to go into Lihue for some adult stuff, so they take us to their friend Ginger’s house at the remote back of Hanalei Valley to be babysat. I’m annoyed about this, but after the Fire Incident we aren’t allowed to roam unsupervised as much.

  Ginger lives with her son Kala in a ramshackle dwelling across the street from a pasture with the smooth, olive-green eel of the Hanalei River on the far side of it.

  Tiger Espere, the Hawaiian surfer who taught Pop to throw net, is Kala’s dad, which automatically makes Kala cool. He’s a wiry black-haired boy Bonny’s age, full of energy.

  “Kala, show them around.” Ginger’s busy washing dishes. She’s a tall blonde woman with a big smile. “Go play.”

  “Let’s go see the river,” I say after we’ve looked at Kala’s room and I’ve verified that there’s nothing much to do there. TV still hasn’t come to Kauai because of its remoteness and rugged mountains, and Kala’s trucks and blocks don’t interest me. I’m hoping to see if there are fish in the river.

  “We gotta cross da pasture. Get cows in there.” Kala speaks pidgin, which we aren’t allowed to at home. I can speak it, but don’t do it much because I think it sounds lame for haoles to speak pidgin, like we’re trying too hard.

  “We’ll take sticks,” I tell him. So, armed with some stout lengths of hau bush, we set out across the pasture.

  Halfway across, we see one of the cows, a shiny black one, acting funny. It trots back and forth, tosses its head, snorts. It’s acting like Ferdinand, the main character in one of our favorite picture books. We drop the sticks because they aren’t big enough to swat a fly on the cow’s shiny black flanks.

  “Let’s hurry.” I grab Bonny’s hand. Kala grabs her other one. We jog, headed for a line of trees by the river. Whatever this cow’s problem is, we should be okay over there.

  The animal drops its head, snorting and pawing the ground.

  It’s not a cow at all. It’s a bull, and it fires out of the corner like a sleek, thundering, two-ton missile, aiming right for us.

  “RUN!” I yell. Coward that I am, I let go of my sister’s hand and run as fast as I can, making for a single tree in the middle of the field. Bonny stumbles and falls with a cry. I’m horrified that I let go, and turn to look, but the bull runs right over her and keeps coming after me. Kala falls to the ground, too, and now it’s just me, running for my life, with the bull right behind.

  I reach the tree, a sturdy guava, and jump into the branches, hauling myself up just as the bull rams the trunk with his head, shaking it so hard I almost fall out. I cling like a monkey, and glance back expecting to see my sister’s mangled corpse—but she and Kala, hand in hand, are running back and reach the fence, scrambling through.

  The bull makes another run at the tree, ramming it. He snorts, paws the ground, stomps back and forth. I try to climb higher, but guavas aren’t tall trees. The branches are barely above the bull’s head and I can’t get any higher because they’re too thin. I hang on tight as the bull takes out his wrath on the slender trunk. All of the tree’s guavas fall into the grass, shaken loose by the ramming.

  Kala and Bonny have reached the house, yelling for Ginger. Ginger comes running out, carrying a section of two-by-four.

  “Help!” I scream, as the tree whips back and forth under the bull’s latest assault.

  “I’m coming!” Ginger runs across the pasture, waving the two-by-four at the bull. “Shoo! Get lost!”

  I’m sure I’m about to watch a scene twice as grisly as the pig killing in Wainiha, as the bull swings around to face her and shakes his head. His stubby horns are still lethal enough to leave scars on the guava tree. He paws the ground, rolling red-rimmed eyes at her.

  Ginger never slows down as she runs across the pasture toward us. “Get!”

  Ginger whacks the bull on the rump with a smack like hitting a home run in softball. The bull gives a startled, indignant snort. She hits it again, and it yelps this time. I didn’t know bulls could yelp. “Get out of here!”

  The bull snorts one more time, then gallops away to join the rest of the cows in the far corner of the pasture.

  Ginger is an Amazon, a Viking conqueror, and an avenging angel all in one. She’d look good in a helmet and chain mail. My imagination turns the two-by-four into a battle-axe.

  I’m awed by her.

  “Come on down, honey. What were you kids thinking of, coming out here!” Ginger scolds and admonishes as I climb down out of the tree. We walk, holding hands, toward the fence.

  I keep a wary eye on the bull. Once I’m on the safe side of the fence I’m ashamed of my cowardice and burst into tears. “I feel so bad. I left Bonny and Kala behind to get trampled.”

  “He chased you so the little kids were okay. You led the bull away from them,” she says, kindness in her light-speckled blue eyes. “Never run away from bulls. Face them, yell loud, whack them if you can. He went for you because you were running out in front.”

  This sounds like good wisdom, for both bulls and bullies.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Lilikoi Summer

  Tita, Bonny, and me at the Estate

  Age: 10, Haena, Kauai, 1975

  Bon and I are playing in the yard on the swing when Knight and his much shorter buddy, Chris, come walking by. They’re armed with sticks and whacking everything in their path. Knight and I get along fine at school, but I haven’t had any adventures with him since our trip up the Kalihiwai River, which seems like forever ago. Now that I’m ten, I’ve started to notice boys in a different way, and want them to like me.

  The boys whisper a conference and come over to our fence.

  “Hey, Toby. Come play with us,” Knight commands.

  I glance at Bonny. She gives a little headshake, but I ignore that. “Sure.”

  I follow the boys out of our gate and down the unpaved, sandy-dirt road. We talk about school and how terrible the teachers are, and how there hasn’t been much surf lately. The boys are being nice, and we’ve reached Bunker Spreckels’s house, a cedar sprawl with a big spreading kamani tree in the yard. Bunker is a rich young guy who only lives there sometimes, and all of our parents have been to his crazy giant parties.

  “Looks like no one’s home. Let’s check it out,” Chris says. I’m nervous about getting caught trespassing but follow the boys into the yard. They roam around and seem to be looking for stuff to take.

  “I have an idea. Let’s play rescue,” Chris says, holding up a length of rope he found under the big house.

  “Sounds lame.” We’re getting older now, and I’m too savvy for any variations on Tiger Hunt.

  Chris narrows his eyes at me. He’s one of those boys who’s never going to grow very tall and is angry at everyone about it, pushing harder and being meaner to prove something. Knight is still l
ooking around the house, his back to us.

  Chris persists. “You’re going to be taken captive by a tribe of hostile Indians.”

  “Hell no. I don’t think so.” I get ready to run, turning toward the gate we just climbed through.

  “You’re not in much of a position to argue. It’s two against one.” Chris snaps the rope between his hands.

  I can run really fast, but Knight’s bigger and faster than either of us. If he thinks this idea is stupid, it won’t happen. Oh, Krishna Buddha God, please don’t let it happen.

  Knight walks toward me, smiling—and it’s never good when he grins like that. “Yeah, Toby. You’re a captive. And we’ll come rescue you.”

  I bolt for the fence, and the game is on.

  Knight catches me easily around the waist and hauls me, with Chris pinching and slapping and whooping in an Indian brave imitation, back toward the tree.

  I don’t fight them because I’ll get hurt worse if I do. I’m hoping the rescue part will be more fun than the captivity part. Our parents are friends, and Darren will give Knight lickins if he’s so mean that I have to tell on him. After our fun adventure on the Kalihiwai River, I hope Knight’s still a friend, even if I know Chris isn’t.

  All these thoughts flicker through my mind in an instant.

  They tie me to the big kamani tree. I let them do it.

  “Not too tight. Don’t want to cut off her circulation,” Knight says. He doesn’t plan to hurt me. Lighting a fire at my feet to burn me at the stake has already occurred to my overactive imagination—now that would be bad.

  “We’ll be back soon to rescue you,” Chris says, with an evil grin, and he and Knight lope off down the sandy road.

  I wait. I test my bonds. I wait some more. I glance around. The wind rustles in the kamani leaves overhead. Something rattles in the empty, deserted party house. The bark of the tree is harsh and scratchy on my bare legs and arms.