“Look what I got,” Riggins said when the package arrived. He held up a jar of preserved jalapeño peppers. “One of these will make him sorry.”
“I don’t think monkeys eat peppers,” Pang said.
“Maybe they do, maybe they don’t.”
“Ask his brother,” McCarty said, snickering.
Riggins grinned and walked over to Rossman’s bunk. Rossman was lying there reading his geography book. “Hey, Dorkman,” Riggins said. “Your red-butt brother eat these?”
“Grow up,” Rossman said, and rolled away from us.
“Stupid retard,” Riggins said back.
Smythe laughed. But he didn’t know why. It wasn’t funny.
Pang was right.
When Riggins threw a jalapeño in the cage, the monkey picked it up, smelled it, and threw it back out. Dumb idea.
Pang, McCarty, and Smythe, munching peanuts and M&M’s, waited to see what Riggins would do next.
“Smythe,” Riggins finally said. “Gimme some of those peanuts?”
Smythe gave him a few.
Riggins broke a pepper open with his thumb and stuffed the peanuts inside. “It’s the little seeds that make it hot, right?” he said. “Well, maybe he’ll go for the peanuts and get those hot little things all over his fingers.” He looked up and flicked his eyebrows.
“Hey, psycho,” Riggins whispered. “You’re the absolute ugliest, stupidest, stinkingest, sorriest monkey I’ve ever seen in my life.”
McCarty snickered. The monkey stared at Riggins from the far corner.
“Hey,” Riggins went on. “I’m talking to you. I got something better.” He dangled the pepper from his fingers, then eased it into the cage, gently, so the peanuts wouldn’t fall out. Then he threw a peanut next to it as bait.
The monkey blinked.
A moment later he scrambled over, picked up the peanut, and ate it on the spot. Then he picked up the pepper and ran back to his corner. He looked at it and smelled it. But this time he saw the peanuts and started picking them out.
Smythe glanced back toward the store, praying the owner wouldn’t come out. Then he turned back and watched the monkey eat one of the peanuts. And another. And . . .
The monkey froze. Looked up. Dropped his jaw.
And went berserk—screaming, screaming, screaming, bouncing around the cage like a pinball, charging the mesh, slamming into it and shaking it, shrieking at Riggins, who along with Smythe, McCarty, and Pang, ran for their lives, laughing themselves to tears.
“I going call the police!” somebody yelled.
Back at school,
when Rossman heard the jalapeño story, he went looking for Riggins, and when he found him, he told Riggins in front of Smythe and Pang and McCarty that he was the saddest case of a human being he’d ever seen.
“Screw you, Dorkman,” Riggins said. “You can’t even control your own goddamn drool, idiot spazmo.”
Smythe winced.
Pang found something he needed to do elsewhere.
But McCarty laughed and walked off with Riggins.
“I got another idea,”
Riggins said to Smythe and Pang a few days later. He grinned and leaned closer, as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear. “Spit,” he said.
“What?”
“Spit. We get the monkey to spit at Dorkman.”
“Why?” Smythe said.
“What do you mean, why? Rossman’s a dork, that’s why.”
“He . . . he’s not so bad.”
“You’re such a loser, Smythe,” Riggins said. “You heard what that idiot called me.”
“Well, yeah.”
“You bet your ugly face you did, and if you think I’m letting it pass, you’re as crazy as that stupid monkey. Come on, Smythe, don’t be such a coward. God, it’ll be funny. Listen, you got to get Rossman to come see the monkey, okay? He won’t do jack for me.”
“I don’t know . . .”
Riggins gave Smythe a sour, disgusted look and said, “Fricken pansy.”
“Okay okay,” Smythe said.
“There you go,” Riggins said, slapping Smythe on the back. “Hey, sorry about calling you a pansy. I was just mad, okay?”
“Sure.”
That’s when Pang told Riggins he should just leave Rossman alone, that Rossman was just like the monkey, only the monkey could at least get out of his cage.
“I had it wrong, Smythe,” Riggins said. “Pang’s the pansy.”
Pang shook his head, and Riggins walked off with his arm draped over Smythe’s shoulder.
Well, I sure got
suckered into that, didn’t I, Smythe thought, lying there in the dark, waiting for Rossman to come to his senses and come out of the jungle.
And he had. Fallen into it like a slug of lead. Riggins got Smythe to sweet-talk Rossman back into the group, telling him they were all sorry about everything. And Rossman bought it. Smythe closed his eyes and shook his head, remembering that Sunday.
After the beach Rossman, Smythe, Riggins, McCarty, and a handful of other guys who’d heard what was going down all bought Cokes and candy and ice cream from Doi Store as usual, then gathered around the monkey’s cage. Rossman, standing crooked, grinned and seemed to Smythe to be genuinely happy about being one of the guys again.
Riggins nodded to Smythe, and Smythe put his hand on Rossman’s back. “Have you seen this monkey yet?”
Rossman, still grinning, said he hadn’t and moved closer to the cage. Smythe pointed the monkey out, and Rossman smiled and studied the monkey. And the monkey studied him back.
Riggins mouthed to Smythe, Make him go closer.
Smythe frowned, feeling kind of weird, but said to Rossman, “Take a closer look. Here, throw him a couple peanuts.” He gave Rossman a handful.
No one moved, just munched and slurped and ate like they were all at the movies. But Smythe knew they were all biting their lips to keep from laughing. Everyone knew what was coming.
Rossman said, “Here, mongey, mongey, mongey,” and dropped a peanut through the mesh.
Boom! Bam! Wham!
The monkey flew at the mesh.
Rossman jerked back and almost fell over, and Smythe saw the look on his face and it burned into his brain, and even to this night, remembering it all in the dark, he couldn’t get that face, that look, out of his head. Everyone whooped with laughter, having known the monkey would do that, whooped and laughed and staggered around bent over with exaggerated laughing pains.
The monkey spat a wad at Rossman and hit him in the chest. Rossman looked down at it. Smythe watched him wipe the spit away, smearing it with the palm of his hand.
“Ahhh, he touched it,” McCarty said. “Sick!”
They all backed off, maybe hoping Rossman would chase them.
But Rossman just stood there, mouth half-open, looking back at the monkey, the terror fading, the sudden fright.
The monkey screeched one last screech, then ambled back over to its corner.
Still, Rossman didn’t move.
And Smythe kept watching him. What now grew in Rossman’s eyes? Rage? Sorrow? Smythe couldn’t stop looking.
“God, Rossman,” Riggins said. “You just going to stand there? Spit back.”
The guy from the store came running out and everyone backed off, everyone but Rossman. The man waved his hands at him. “You go home! Go!”
Rossman looked at the man, then blinked, then slowly listed away.
He didn’t say a word on the bus. Didn’t turn around once. Didn’t smile, laugh, or joke with anyone. Didn’t even flip Riggins off when Riggins yelled something about if his hand was rotting off yet.
Again, Smythe laughed but didn’t know why.
That was yesterday.
What a sucker I was, Smythe thought, lying in the grass. What a heartless sucker.
Now Rossman had disappeared. No one had seen him all day. Smythe remembered again the headmaster’s scowl at dinner, his accusing, face-searching silence after announcing that Rossman was missing and did anyone in the room have any knowledge of where he had gone. And why. When nobody answered—not even with a cough—he’d walked out of the Mess Hall with the place so quiet you could hear the floorboards creaking under his feet.
It wasn’t until after lights-out that Smythe remembered Rossman’s jungle place.
“Rossman,” he whispered, now squinting into the black undergrowth.
Thick, mucky silence.
He has to be here, Smythe thought. In there with the toads and mosquitoes and worms. Where else would he go? Where else could he go?
Smythe looked up, watched the clouds cover the moon, heavier clouds now. Clouds that stayed there. A faint light spot marked where the moon was.
“Rossman . . . I’m . . . I’m really sorry. Please . . . come back to the dorm, okay? Don’t hide out here. Don’t.”
Smythe realized that he was begging. Really. As if he were down on his knees pleading with Rossman to forgive him, to release him from his . . . his . . . guilt.
“Rossm—um . . . Brian . . . listen, things will be different, now. You have my word on that, okay? Really, I promise. Really.”
No breath of wind fluttered the leaves. No crickets, no toads, no stirring animals. The blackened sky swelled and came down and enveloped Smythe in its eerie silence. Even the mosquitoes had vanished.
“Rossman?”
But Rossman never came out.
Because he wasn’t there.
Never had been.
The next day
they heard that Rossman had somehow made it all the way down to Hilo, fifty miles about, and, finding nowhere to go, had checked into the police station, where he was now, waiting for his parents to fly over from Honolulu to get him. And take him home, where it was safe.
Not one of them would ever see Rossman again.
Except Smythe.
Who’d see him every night, in the cage of his mind.
Angel-Baby
Okay, this is it.
I have this problem.
Her name is Tina Marie Angel-Baby Diminico, and no I’m not making that up. Luckily, she just goes by Tina. Both of us are going on to eleventh grade after this summer, but me and her go all the way back to fourth. I’ve know her longer than that, but in fourth grade we got into a big fight, so naturally we got to know each other pretty well.
A freak of nature is what me and my two best friends, Jimmy and Alton, used to call her. Because she was taller and stronger than all of us, and not only that, she had this way of looking down her nose like we were somebody’s spit splattered on the street. So of course we didn’t like her.
But that fight. Guess what it was we fought about? Tetherball.
This was when we were all still at the small school down in Kailua town. All of us must have played that dumb game ten thousand times, always arguing about who won and who cheated and who was a liar and all that. It was good fun, though. Arguing was part of it.
But this one time was different.
I was there with Alton and Jimmy and three girls, and one of them was Tina. Me and her were up. We played a good game, and I won.
But she said no she won and I cheated because I didn’t stop the ball before it wound all the way up on the pole. But I did, I blasted it around and beat her.
But she said, “Israel, you are such a liar.”
Then my friend Alton said, “Forget it, Izzy. It’s my turn now.” But Tina shoved him back. Ho, he didn’t like that. But she was bigger than him, yeah? What could he do?
Okay, till then it was only an argument. But then she said to me, “Listen, midget, you didn’t see it. It was too high up for you, yeah? You so small your feet don’t even touch when you sit on the toilet.”
Ho! She didn’t have to say something like that. So I said, “Yeah well you so fat you would sink a barge, you stupid freak of nature.”
Alton gasped, I remember, saying “
ahhhhh,
” and looking bug-eye because he was thinking she might kill me. But Jimmy was grinning like a shark.
Tina jabbed her fat finger in my face saying, “You going pay for what you just said, Shrimpy.”
I slapped her finger away.
And that did it.
Boom!
She slammed me with the pads of her elephant hands. Felt like I got hit by a bowling ball. I said, “You stinking Amazon,” and I charged her, yelling, “You stupid, ugly girl Frankenstein!”
I remember I said that. Boy, was I mad. Us two hit hard and fell to the ground and rolled around like we were hugging, spitting and scratching and letting loose words that would make a gorilla go bald.
Then luckily for us our teacher, Mrs. Silva, showed up with a broom, slapping at us like we were dogs fighting over a rat.
The rest of that day Tina didn’t talk to me and I didn’t talk to her.
But in the days after I couldn’t get any of it out of my head. It was all so dumb. I mean, fighting about tetherball? Come on.
Alton and Jimmy wouldn’t let me forget it, either. I can still hear them even now laughing and going “
Bwahahahahah!
Izzy went fight one girl!
Aahahahahha!”
Jeese.
So embarrassing.
Two or three days later I saw Tina at recess. She was alone for once, eating a banana on a swing. Amazon snack, I was thinking. Monkey meal. I glanced around. Nobody was looking, and Alton and Jimmy were playing handball on the blacktop.
So I wandered over and said, “Hey.”
Tina looked at me with half eyes, like, You stupid or what? You think I like talk to you?
I said, “I really won that game, you know.”
“No. You didn’t.” She was so matter-of-fact.
I said, “How come you so stubborn, huh?”
She grinned at me. “Me? I’m not stubborn. I’m nice.” Which made me laugh.
She shrugged, tossed the banana peel into the weeds behind the swings, and sat there waiting for me to do something else. Shee.
“Okay okay,” I said. “Forget the game. You won, fine. Who cares anyway? But still, it was stupid to fight. I mean, don’t you think?”
And you know what she said? She said, “You’re right, Izzy. It was stupid to fight. I forgive you.”
“You
what
!” I said.
She held up her hands, saying, “Just kidding, little man, just kidding, cool your jets, already.”
Ca-ripes, she always making fun of my size, but I tried to be big about it. So I sat on a swing next to her. Funny how after you fight somebody you want to talk to them.
Crazy.
But even crazier was this: We became really good friends that day.
In the fifth grade she sat at my table and showed me how to make those pointy-foldy things where you pick a flap and look under it and there’s your fortune. But hers was fixed. Under every flap she wrote, An angel is watching you.
Huh?
And listen to this, one time in the sixth grade Tina made me
haupia
for my birthday, Hawaiian coconut pudding cake. And she made a card out of pounded tree bark and wrote on it:
Just for you, Izzy—from your best friend Angel-Baby.
I thought, Angel-Baby? How come she wrote that and not Tina?
Weird.
But the
haupia,
wow. My mom raised her eyebrows when I brought it home. When she tasted it, she closed her eyes and said, “Perfect.” She winked and I frowned, and hid the
haupia
in the back of the refrigerator so Alton and Jimmy wouldn’t find it when they came over to raid our kitchen, because Mom was right. Tina’s
haupia
was perfect.
But Angel-Baby?
And that’s not all.
You see, for a long time now me and Tina have been tight as twins. Starting in the seventh grade it was like when she wanted to do something, she called me. And if I had something going on, I called her. We still do that, and that’s all fine. I like it. Alton says, “You just like her because of her old man’s boat, Izzy. Admit it. You like that boat.”
Sure I like it.
Her father is a fisherman, you see. And Alton and Jimmy know that’s what I going be. A fisherman. Just like Tina’s father, the famous Lefty Diminico.
But the thing is—okay, I admit it, I get kind of jealous about this, but so what?—see, Tina works for Lefty as his deckhand, the only girl deckhand that harbor has ever seen. And she’s good, maybe even the best. She’s earned it.
But still I get jealous, because she’s so good, and it just comes natural to her. You know? Some people just have what it takes.
But anyway I have my own boat. So what if it’s only a fiberglass skiff? It’s still a boat.
You can find it tied up in the small bay behind the pier. What I use it for is when I get time off from my summer job, I take it out and anchor in the harbor. Then I practice my guitar, which I started playing in the summer before ninth grade. Besides being a fisherman, my dream is to play slack-key Hawaiian music at some hotel at night. So I practice. A lot.
But I have a real job, too.
Grocery-store bagger, which is not so bad. You get to see lots of people.
But mostly I sit in that skiff, where I can practice my brains out and no one can bother me or hear my mistakes.
Anyway, to get back to my problem.
One time last year us guys were sitting near the pool at King Kam Hotel. We only got three hotels in our small town. This was the one down by the pier. Anyway, I was playing my guitar, and Alton and Jimmy were nodding their heads to the music and checking out the haole tourist girls. Alton likes to think of himself as a loverboy.
It seems to work, sometimes.
So Alton says, “Hey Izzy, you getting pretty good on that guitar. One day maybe you really might play in some hotel lounge. I can see it. All the drunk guys going say, Play me one for my sweet, okay? Then they going stick five-dollar bills in your shirt pocket. You going get rich.”
And Jimmy said, “Nah nah nah, Alton, that’s not it, Izzy going play love songs to the freak of nature. Shoot, how come we never thought of that before now? Am I right, Izzy? Huh?”
“Shuddup, you dingdongs,” I said, pretending I was mad. But I wasn’t.
Alton the stupit laughed and slapped his leg, saying, “Mr. and Mrs. Freak,
bwahahahaha.
”
“Alton,” I said, “if she ever heard you say that, you can kiss your face goodbye.”
“You got that right, brah,” Jimmy said.
I can admit it. Tina’s
still
bigger than all of us, but so what? She’s about six-one, hundred fifty, something like that. And all we ever going be is puny punks, prob’ly all our days. Standing next to me, Tina’s a giraffe, but don’t you laugh, okay, because right now I got that serious problem.
Because my story gets worse.
A couple weeks ago I was at the pier with Alton and Jimmy, as usual. This time I had my new Taylor 612 blond-face guitar with the cutout music box. I was trying to play “Ku’u Kika Kahiko” by Ozzie Kotani in Mauna Loa tuning with the alternating bass. Really sweet song.
Okay, anyway, while we were there, here comes Lefty’s boat into the harbor, the
Angel-Baby II,
forty-five feet of bright white fiberglass glowing in the late afternoon sun. Tina was standing on the bow with the dock rope coiled in her hands, ready to jump off when they came up to the pier.
Listen.
She had on jeans shorts and a white T-shirt, barefoot. Skin like creamy coffee. Long black hair blowing in the breeze, and when she spotted me she smiled and gave me a small wave and kissed me with her eyes—ca-ripes, she doesn’t even know what she’s doing to me. Even then, before I knew what I know today, I thought man, how much longer can me and her be just friends?
Things were . . .
Changing.
I stood up and handed my guitar to Jimmy because I didn’t trust Alton to hold it. I told Jimmy, “Don’t let this bang on anything, okay?” And Jimmy took it and fake-tripped, pretending he was falling into the water. I nearly had a heart attack, the idiot bozo babooze.
They never let up, those punks.
I jogged over and Tina tossed me the rope. I wrapped it around a cleat, then ran back and caught the stern line and tied that up, too.
Tina winked.
The
Angel-Baby II
had two men and their wives on board. Lefty and Tina tossed the four fish they caught up onto the pier. Kind of a junk day, only four small kawakawas, or what the mainland guys call skipjack tuna, maybe ten pounds each. Lying on the pier they looked like stiff torpedoes.
Lefty nodded to me, then told Tina he’d be right back and took the two couples back to their hotel in his truck.
Tina said, “You want to help put the boat to bed?”
Of course I did. So I jumped aboard, yelling, “Hey, Jimmy, try bring me my guitar,” and Jimmy got up and brought it over and handed it down to me. I took it and set it on the bunk inside the cabin, then came back out on deck.
Jimmy winked and wagged his eyebrows, and Tina saw it and said, “What, Jimmy? Got eye twitch?”
Jimmy grinned and untied the
Angel-Baby II,
then tossed the lines aboard. Tina started up the boat and walked it out into the harbor, and the water was so quiet and silky. When I looked back, Alton and Jimmy were getting smaller and smaller behind us, both of them just standing there, looking.
As Tina skippered the boat between the moorings I walked up the aisle and sat in the seat across from her. She turned and smiled at me, and kept smiling.
“What?” I said.
She waited a second, then said, “You want a job?”
A job?
“Sure,” I said. “When you like me to take over?”
She laughed. Man, her teeth are so white. “Funny boy,” she said. “I mean for a few days.”
I told her I already had a job, and she said, “You call that a job? How about this? How about a little trip to Honolulu for dry-dock repairs? Daddy can’t do it because of his hip.”
I said, “What’s wrong with his hip?” And she told me it was some old high school football injury coming back to bite him. He had to have an operation.
“I have to take the boat to Honolulu and fly home,” she said. “Take about three days. But I can’t do it alone. I thought . . . you know . . . maybe you could come with me. Want to?”
Whoa. Hey, I mean, think about it. What that meant.
I said, “Well,
yeah
. . . sure . . . but I don’t know. When?”
“Couple weeks. Ask your mom. Or do you want me to?”
“I’ll do it,” I said, looking down.
My mom likes Tina. A lot. So she didn’t even blink when I brought it up. “Sure,” Mom said. “Go. You want me to talk to your boss?”
I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t she
see
how Tina was looking at me lately? Didn’t she see it was diff’rent now?
But then Mom didn’t know about the volcano.
That’s right.
There’s more.
Back in the beginning of summer the volcano blew again. It was all over the papers, but when Tina heard it on the radio, she called me. She said she and her dad were going to drive up and see it that evening, and did I want to come?
So they picked me up and we headed south in Lefty’s smelly fish truck. I remember looking down from way up on the side of the mountain trying to see the ocean far below. But the whole world was as black as octopus ink. Except for up ahead, where there was an orange glow that looked like a small town was on fire.
As we drove closer, Tina’s warm arm was pressing up against mine. And her leg and knee.
Ho, man! Every time I moved, just a little bit, she was right there, still next to me.
So anyway, an hour later we drove into Volcanoes National Park. The eruption was in an old crater. The fountain was shooting straight up and falling straight back down. It looked like a giant sparkler lighting up the night. I can still remember how every tree and rock was ghostly still in their sharp shadows. And you know how it’s supposed to be cold up there, at that altitude? Not that night. It was like we were on Mars.
Lots of people had the same idea as us. Cars were parked bumper-to-bumper for about a half mile along the road. We walked awhile, then made our way through the jungle to the edge of the crater.
The air got hotter, and hotter, then
way
hotter. When we broke out of the trees, it was like we were standing in a fire. The lava fountain was maybe a quarter of a mile away from us, and it was roaring and crackling like a sugar mill—or maybe it was the trees around us that were crackling. I had to shield my face with my hand, it was so hot, like you would if you were staring into the sun.