“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.
I sat on the pier with my spinner, gazing across the harbor to the island: the small village lined with palm trees; the old royal palace guarding a small sandy cove; the steeple of the first missionary church; Kona Inn with its long iron-red roof poking through the coconut trees; a lazy town peeking over the seawall. I would never have told a soul, but I was thanking God that I hadn’t seen what Randy had seen. I didn’t want to believe there was any other world than the one that existed right there in front of me.
I cringed, wondering how I was going to take it when, too soon, the army would come knocking on my door, too.
“Jake!”
Dad stood on the stern deck of the
Iwalani
with one hand on the cabin roof. “Come on the boat for a minute, will you?”
I stowed my spinner in the back of Dad’s truck, then climbed down onto the boat and sat at the cabin table across from him.
“I’ve been thinking about Randy,” Dad said. “Sitting around the house all day, doing nothing but letting his beard grow, shooting his rifle at anything that moves.”
I nodded. “I know. Whenever I try to bring up things to do, he either doesn’t listen or tells me it isn’t like it used to be anymore.”
Dad leaned on the table with his fingers laced together. “Jake, listen. I want you to try to get him to come down here. He won’t listen to any of my advice, and maybe that’s my fault, I don’t know. But I’m thinking maybe if we can get him out on the boat, it might bring him around. Maybe not, too. But we can’t just sit around and watch him sink.”
The ocean lapped and plopped against the side of the boat. “I can try, Dad. I guess.”
“We can fish, just you, me, and him. You think Randy will go for that?”
“If he doesn’t, then he’s too far gone for anything. Before the army he’d have sold me to a tourist for a quarter to get to do that.”
“How about Sunday?”
“All right.”
When I got home I found Mama sitting in the kitchen peeling mangoes and slicing them into a bowl.
“Where’s Randy?” I said, flopping down across from her.
“In his room.”
I started to push myself up, but Mama said, “Wait, he’s sleeping.”
“Sleeping? It’s three in the afternoon.”
“He sat out on the porch half the night,” Mama said, handing me a slice of mango on the knife blade.
I took it and thought for a minute, savoring the sweet mango. “I guess I’ll go for a walk with the dogs.”
“Wait, take Randy with you. It’s time he got up anyway. Go, wake him . . . he may not show it, Jake, but he’s always glad to see you.”
I pushed myself up. “I used to believe that.”
Randy’s room was dark and smelled like stale sweat. He’d cut up an old cardboard box and taped it over the one window in the room. He lay on his back wearing only a pair of army-green boxers, the crook of his right arm covering his eyes. The .22 rested beside him. The skin on his left knee, where the leg ended, was dark and gnarled like a twisted root.
I quickly looked away.
“What do you want, pig breath?” he said without moving his arm. His beard was thick around the jaw and moustache, but splotchy in the cheeks. He didn’t look like Randy at all.
“You going to sleep all day?” I said.
“Do you care?”
Randy may have looked a mess, but his room was immaculate. His shell collection was symmetrically regimented along two long shelves, from his large spiral conch down to the miniature pearl-colored auger he’d found off White Sands Beach. The surface of his desk was bare, the chair centered under it.
“Listen,” I said. “Dad doesn’t have a charter this Sunday. . . . He said he’d take us out. Fishing’s pretty good now.”
Randy took his arm off his face, sat up, and rubbed his eyes. “What? Are you blind? How do you suppose I can catch any damn thing with one leg gone, ah? Answer me that.”
“Since when do you need two legs to reel in a line?” I folded my arms and looked around the room, then added, “This place stinks.”
Randy snorted. “I like it.”
“Listen,” I said. “All you need is balance. Put your foot in the middle of the footrest, that’s all.”
“Pshh,” Randy spat. “You have no idea, man.”
“What if I make something to fit between your knee and the footrest, so you can use both legs?”
Randy pushed himself up and hopped over to the wall where his crutches stood, then went back for his rifle. “Come,” he said.
I followed him out to the porch. Mama said “good morning” from the kitchen, but he ignored her.
Outside he squinted against the white afternoon sky, then crutched himself down past the end of the chicken coops. “Birds don’t come near the house anymore,” he said.
On the far side, where he couldn’t be seen from the house, Randy leaned his crutches up against one of the chicken coops and settled down onto a wooden box that he’d brought down and set up. He took the rifle and pointed into the mango tree at the edge of Silva’s pasture. “See that mynah bird on the right? The lower branch?”
“What are you shooting all the birds for?”
Randy held still, then shot the bird. Five or six other birds flew out of the tree. He handed me the rifle. “You shoot one.”
“I told you before, I don’t shoot birds.”
He put the butt of the rifle on the ground and his hand around the barrel.
In our silence the birds came back and settled into the tree.
“What about Sunday?” I asked.
Randy jerked the rifle off the ground and threw it to me. “Okay, I’ll go. But first you going shoot a bird.” He glared at me.
I turned and raised the rifle. It was well oiled, and the small bullet pumped easily into the chamber. The bird was just minding its own business when I hit it.
“You happy now? Ah? You happy to see that bird die? Make you feel better?”
Randy grinned and reached for the rifle.
Before I gave it back, I pumped bullets into it, one after another, and blasted them into the ground around the tree, chasing the birds away for the rest of the afternoon.
I threw him the rifle and left.
Mama came out on the porch. “What’s going on out here? What’s all that shooting?”
I strode by without looking up. “Ask whoever that is out there behind the chicken coops.”
At eight o’clock on Sunday
morning I was sitting in the stern cockpit of the
Iwalani
with gallons of clean ocean air pouring into my face.
Randy sat stiffly at the table in the cabin. He’d hardly said a word all morning. His .22 stood nearby, wedged between the bunk and the cooler.
Behind us four big-game lures skipped and twirled in the wake. The massive island grew bluer as we trolled away from it.
Dad sat sideways behind the wheel, talking in secret code on the radio with his friend Luther, skipper of the
Darnell-C.
Luther said, “Ho, you should see Mauna Kea, hazy blue, sleeping under a hat of clouds . . . nice like that,” which meant there were a zillion birds on the southern fishing grounds due west of the long, green, rectangular pasture high on the rising face of the mountain. “Clouds” meant birds, “nice” meant active—fish were biting. Dad and Luther changed their codes every week to keep radio eavesdroppers confused. Dad slowly headed the boat south so as not to draw too much attention if anyone was watching him.
Someday Randy would have to get a real fake leg, I suppose. But for now it was either watch him hop around on one foot, or make him something. So all that week I’d worked in the garage on a contraption that Randy could stick on the end of his leg so that he could have the support of both legs in fighting a big fish. I set a two-by-two into Dad’s lathe and carved out a stick-leg with a twirly design on it, kind of like a fancy table leg, only my leg was kind of rough. I cut up an old rubber glove for a skid pad, and tied it onto the bottom with monofilament fishing line. Then I made a knee cushion on top with leather and foam rubber, and with a belt hooked up a strap that Randy could tighten around his thigh to hold the thing in place. One afternoon on the boat I bent my leg at the knee and gave it a try. It was wobbly, but it worked. You could get used to it.
After we’d cruised on out beyond the lighthouse, I brought the stick-leg out and showed it to Randy. He studied it a minute, then threw it across the aisle to the bunk and hopped out into the sunlight to sit on the fish box.
Dad shook his head, his eyes on the water.
I decided to go up on the roof for some fresh air.
At about ten o’clock the boat rolled suddenly into a starboard turn. It took only a few seconds to find what Dad had seen.
Noio.
Seabirds, hundreds of agitated terns working about three acres of ocean, the mass of them rising against the pale blue outline of Mauna Loa in the far distance, then one after another falling and slapping the water to lure the fish up. Would Randy shoot at them? If he did he wouldn’t be shooting long with Dad around.
I scrambled down from the roof.
Dad edged the frothing ocean where zillions of flying fish skimmed the water, trying to escape larger fish below and birds above. I grabbed one of the big reels and started pulling in the lure.
“Never mind those,” Dad called. “Randy and I will get them. You get a small rig ready for catching a bait fish.”
He throttled down to neutral and ran back to the reels. “Randy, bring in the line on the starboard outrigger. I’ll get this one.”
I plowed through a box of lures in a drawer under the bunk. “Get a pink one,” Dad called over his shoulder. “They’ll strike pink before anything else. Pink with a pearl head. Randy!”
Randy didn’t move.
I grabbed the lure he wanted and attached it directly onto a fifteen-pound-test nylon line, skipping the more visible wire leader. Dad told us long ago that fish had brains, good ones, and could spot a fake a mile away.
Dad reeled in both big rigs and carried them into the cabin. He laid them on the bunk, ignoring Randy as he passed.
Randy stared at some spot on the sea, somewhere far away.
Dad brought the boat back up to trolling speed.
I set the bait rig in a rod socket and dropped the pink lure into the wake, letting out about seventy-five yards of line.
“Set the drag loose so it won’t beat up the fish,” Dad shouted from the wheel. “When it comes, it’s going to come fast. I can feel it.”
We wove in and out of the feeding birds, dragging the single pearl-headed lure, moving in the same direction as the running fish.
A couple of years ago Randy would have been pacing the deck, throwing out his own ideas, and Dad would have saluted and said, “Yessir, cap’m sir, so solly, cap’m.”
When the reel started clicking, hooking a small bait fish, Dad throttled down, put the boat in neutral. I reeled the fish in, slow and easy, so I wouldn’t damage it.
Randy sat, looking bored.
Dad came back with a heavy trolling rig and a threaded twelve-inch bait needle. He set the rod in a holder, then bent over the transom and lifted the small, striped fish aboard. A kawakawa, maybe eight pounds.
Dad turned it upside down, covering its eyes with his hand to calm it. When the fish was still, Dad held it belly-up in the palm of his hand. It didn’t twitch a muscle. It was as if it had been hypnotized.
Randy watched Dad work but smirked when I caught him looking.
Dad removed the lure and threaded the bait needle through the kawakawa’s eye sockets, just above the eyeballs, right eye to left, and made a loop. Then he ran the large live-bait hook through the loop and twisted it into place. When he was finished, the hook stood point-up on the head of the fish like the comb on the head of a rooster.
The instant he finished, Dad leaned out over the transom and put the fish back into the ocean. It swam off, sluggish at first, but soon burst down into the depths.
All of it took less than twenty seconds.
I peered over the gunnel and watched the fish dive. Flickering silver flashes of sunlight glinted off its flanks and shot back up from the deep, royal blue water.
“We’ll let him run a bit,” Dad said, setting the reel on free spool. “Gotta look natural.”
Exhaust sputtered out from under the hull whenever the stern rose out of the water. I dug into the cooler for a Coke and tossed one over to Randy. He must have been pretty hot, wearing jeans the way he did to cover up his leg. He put the bottle up against his forehead.
Dad held the line and let it run through his fingers, feeling every move the fish made in his fingertips. “He’s scared. Going deep.”
When the bait fish stopped its dive, Dad told me to bring the boat up a notch. I went forward and inched the throttle to a crawl.
Looking back through the cabin, I saw Randy’s head in shadowy silhouette, and beyond, Dad worked the fish in brilliant, open-deck sunlight.
Still holding on to the line, Dad glanced over his shoulder at Randy. “You ready for some fishing, son?”
“You catch ’um,” Randy said.
“Can’t. Got to gaff it and bring it aboard.”
“Then Jake.”