“Don’t beat yourself up,” I said.
Though I rarely went to a neighbor island, I went over there to see what she was really like. She was young enough to be my daughter, and that’s how I felt toward her. She gave me a big hug, and we had coffee.
“Ma, I want do shee-shee!”
The kid Kanoa was just awful and looked local. But he was very well dressed, new shirt and slippers and surfer shorts. I felt sorry for Verna, but I didn’t want him. So I kept tipping her off whenever Erskine was on his way over. I thought I was doing everyone a favor.
On that one and only visit I met her new guy, Junior, and recognized him from what Erskine had told me: hapa-haole, tribal tattoos, Raiders hat on backward, a big laid-back moke who worked an excavator. But I could also see the attraction. He was like, “Whatever,” and that was not Erskine’s way.
What ended it was this visit. I began to think: She’s been through a lot, made a few bad choices and lost her looks living with this blalah, and was making the best of it. But time passed, and I lived with Erskine and got to know him better and became like her. He made me that way, and I knew exactly why she two-timed him.
If I stayed with Erskine that’s how I’d end up, as a stoner and probably cheating on him and getting blamed, and so I fired him and went back to my own island, Lanai, and stayed in touch with Verna.
The last thing Erskine said to me was “I’ll probably stay single. I’ll be okay. I can’t handle hooking up with a new wahine, telling her all my stories, listening to all her stories, and then there’s dealing with her stuffs. I’m married to my job.”
I put it down to Erskine was a haole from the mainland, raised by his mother, and didn’t always understand what he was looking at. Like the tourists who sit on the beach and don’t see those upside-down bowls in the shore-break are turtles feeding on the rocks and far out the puff of mist is a whale blowing, and when the tourists turn their backs the turtles stick their heads up and the whale breaches, slapping itself down sideways. Or they see monster surf and say, “Hey, cool.”
Such a know-it-all giving out speeding tickets is one thing. But when he busted me for possession, and I was still a kid: I couldn’t work for the state or join the army or get back to Maui. So I negotiated a key of coke from some dealers in Oahu, but it ended up in the harbor. Barry Moniz knew, and told his uncle, the chief, and that was the end of my hopes.
When he came home early that night and caught us naked, all in the bed, the overhead light on, his gun pointed at us, I went dead all over, first chicken-skin, then just numb. And afterward I didn’t believe he’d really gone. I thought he was waiting for us to come outside so he could ambush us.
“Buggah wen go or what?” Ledward asked in a whisper.
We sneaked out by the back door.
“Junior. I tink we makeh-die-dead,” he said in the pickup.
I heard that Erskine was transferred to Hilo, and with him on a neighbor island, things quieted down. It was Chief Moniz who told me. He made a few visits to Verna, gave her some money, like he felt sorry for her.
“She no can get food stamp,” he said to me. “Wass the happs?”
The happs was I never smoked another joint from that day and I got a job digging, working an excavator, but because of my police record, not at the landfill, a state job, where I could have made more money. Ledward said she could have gotten us killed, but I said, “It was our own fault. We were the ones that set her up.”
“Because she wen ask for da kine chrabol.”
I was annoyed that he was blaming her. I saw things I’d never seen before, that Verna was in a bind, and after a while I married her on the beach at Hanalei, her kid Kanoa there in a little aloha shirt, a luau, the sunset, a green flash. I never saw Ledward again, because he went to Molokai.
And Verna would get a call from time to time, I guessed from Erskine, she didn’t say, and we’d go stay with my cousin in Kapaa until Erskine gave up and went back to the Big Island. He wanted custody. But I would have said, “Tough. You left her. I married her. This is my hanai kid now.”
Ledward used to say, “Yes, I want to catch waves in a foreign country, maybe Brazil, if I can snort coke there and have sex on the beach.”
He is in Kaunakakai, maybe shaping boards, maybe hanging out. And Verna talks about taking flying lessons, which will never happen. Kanoa is on Oahu, where Chief Moniz retired, and got him apprenticing as a roofer. Kanoa still doesn’t see much of his father, and never knew how his mother almost got shot one night. Erskine’s ex, Noelani, sends Christmas cards and sometimes a pineapple.
I’m glad Erskine just walked away. He did the right thing by not shooting us. Yet he wasn’t innocent. I’d never be able to convince him, but he was responsible. Instead of revenge I ended up with Verna. She makes pickled mango, one of those older women on a back road, selling it in jars, and you’d never guess from her smile the things that have happened to her.
But what was it after all? It was island style, a period of drugs and freaky sex and getting out of hand that all people go through before they settle down, especially on the neighbor islands. Then it passes. But it was all dog luck, because I would have shot me.
The Traveler’s Wife
IN THE CAR on the way home from the Willevers’, Bree said, “It’s funny—” and Harry Dick knew she was about to object to something. She became chatty and opinionated at the wheel, and he was sorry he’d had three drinks because he hated being a passenger, especially her passenger. And what was that odd smell in the back seat?
Harry Dick Furlong, the travel writer, dedicated his books to his wife, Bree; he praised her for her patience in awaiting his return, and the way she ran the house, and coped with the demands of his office when he was on one of his trips — and tonight, as always, at the Willevers’ she had listened to his stories as though hearing them for the first time. He liked to say their marriage was a partnership that worked.
The evening had gone well. The Willevers were good hosts, and grateful to Furlong for agreeing to the dinner so soon after arriving back from his last long trip. In addition to being a reader and a friend, Ed Willever was the Furlongs’ attorney. He was also a tease, and it was a mark of his trust in their friendship that he dared to tease Furlong.
At the meal, Furlong had done most of the talking. He was full of new stories, and though most of them were boasts they sounded authentic. “You couldn’t make this stuff up!” About being starved, stranded, threatened by some rowdy boys, propositioned by a drunken woman at a bar. One about a snake, another about a scorpion. “As a traveler I often feel like a castaway.” At times it seemed it was not Harry Dick at all, but a fictional wanderer named Furlong whom he was recalling with amazement and admiration.
His trips had given him an aura of wizardry, as sudden vanishings and reappearances often do, travel in his way like an accumulation of magic, overcoming dangers as he plunged deeper into the murky world. His books were reports on the extraordinary, news from distant places. His criticism of most travel books was “You could see that sort of thing without ever leaving home.”
He immediately thought “It’s funny—” meant Bree doubted one of the stories he’d told at the Willevers’.
“You don’t believe I had a scorpion in my shoe?” It had leaped out, he’d said, just before he slipped the shoe on.
“Not that,” Bree said. “It was when you talked about not wanting to be known.”
Furlong refused all interviews; he never appeared on television; he avoided book tours — no autographs, never elaborated on his trips, did not answer questions. “It’s all in the book.”