Island Boyz (10 page)

“Yeah yeah,” we had to agree. What else could we do? Together, those two would rule the world.

Unless maybe we could get the Andrade brothers to help us out. “Hey, I got an idea,” I said.

“Forget it!” everyone shouted.

Fine.

Waiting for
the War

About a mile inland
from Pearl Harbor, Henry Long and Sammy Maldonado, two sixteen-year-old island boys, were trying to ride a horse.

Actually, they were trying to catch it.

To Henry the horse was a menace. It would just as soon kick you in the face as look at you, and Henry was kicking himself for having bought it. But he sure wasn’t about to admit that to Sammy.

It was the old forgotten brown horse in the weedy pasture not far from his house. It had been in there for as many years as Henry could remember.

Now it was his.

But he couldn’t ride it because he couldn’t get on it, and he couldn’t get on it because he couldn’t even catch it. The horse had a mean streak as long as an aircraft carrier.

It nipped him on the shoulder. It stepped on his foot and kicked his shin. Henry couldn’t even get a rope over its head, and he was sorry he’d paid any kind of money for it. But Henry had his pride and wasn’t about to admit the horse was a mistake.

“The old man just ruined it,” Sammy told Henry. “Because he never rode it.”

“It ain’t ruined. It’s a good horse.”

“What’s so good about it? You can’t even catch it.”

“So. It just needs to get used to me.”

“Or maybe it just don’t like people. But it looks like a good horse, yeah? Check out its back. Straight, not swayback.”

Henry glared at Sammy, who he knew had never been on a horse in his life. “You catch it then. You get on it.”

“But I think you could ride it, if you’re nice to it.”

“
Nice
to it?”

“Yeah. Give it grass, pet it.”

“You don’t pet horses.”

“How come?”

Henry shook his head. “You just don’t. You brush it, you slap its side or neck, you give it apples and weeds and comb its mane, but you don’t
pet
it. It ain’t a dog. It ain’t a . . . a . . . a cat.”

Sammy shrugged.

Henry looped up the short piece of soft rope and stuck it in the back pocket of his khaki pants.

The horse had belonged to a nice but sly old guy named Wong. “Only eleven years old,” he’d said. “Still young yet, like you, Henry. He just jumpy because of the bombs, yeah? Was too close to all those explosions. Even had one went off in this pasture. Over there. See the hole?”

Henry saw the indentation in the grass. That had been a bad day, he remembered. Lot of noise, lot of smoke, planes, police, sirens. Almost two years now since the Japanese planes came. Thank goodness it was only
one
bad day, and lucky the Japanese never landed troops like everyone thought they would. Really lucky.

“You sure you can ride it?” Henry asked Wong.

“Yeah yeah. Look at him. Strong. Spunky. Got a nice high step. I give you ’um for . . . hmmm . . . fie dollah.”

That’s what did it.
Five dollars.
For a
horse
! Henry couldn’t pass it up.

“But I can only buy it if I can keep it in your pasture,” Henry added. The pasture had plenty of grass, a cool rusty-water pond fed by a mountain stream, and a lean-to shed for when it rained.

Wong said, “Yeah yeah . . . for fifty cents a month.”

Henry scowled at Wong, but he was thinking he could make that much easy, just by shining two pairs of shoes down on Hotel Street. “Why not,” he finally said. He gave Wong the five dollars.

Wong had grinned.

And now Henry knew why.

“Try give it some grass,” Sammy said.

Henry looked at him, thinking of saying something like, He don’t want grass, you idiot, can’t you see he lives in a
field
of grass? Instead he said, “What I need is a bucket of oats.”

“You got a saddle, or you going ride it bareback?”

“I don’t have a saddle.”

“How come you bought it, Henry? You not a horse guy.”

“Because it was only five dollars, and anyways I like horses.”

“Just not this one, yeah?” Sammy said, grinning.

Henry spat, then rubbed his chin. “I’ll think of something. Let’s go down Hotel Street and shine some shoes. I gotta make some money.”

“Yeah, good.”

Henry looped up the rope and crammed it into his back pocket.

When the military
guys weren’t on their bases or maneuvering in the hills or shipping out to some Pacific island, they spent their free time on Hotel Street in downtown Honolulu. And what they did there was stand in line—for tattoos, food, movies, the laundry, bars, and girls. They stood in line for everything because there were so many of them. Thousands.

Sometimes Henry and Sammy went down there and made good money. It was easy, since all those army and navy guys were just standing in lines. Sammy joked around with them, made like he was real friendly, made small talk, trying to drum up some business. And Henry shined the shoes, snapping his dirty rag and spitting on the shiny black toes. They even talked with the civilian mainland war workers sometimes, who ran around with loud mouths and their flashy silk aloha shirts.

But when Henry and Sammy ran across a serviceman or a war worker who was by himself, they would close up like turtles. If it was a bunch of guys, it was easy. A bunch of guys was nobody. But when it was just one guy, then it was a person. And that was not easy, that was different, a person had a name and opinions they didn’t want to hear.

The bottom line was Henry and Sammy didn’t really like all those servicemen and war workers. Nobody Henry knew liked them. They hated it when somebody called them
boy
, or a
native
, or when they heard somebody complaining about being on
this godforsaken rock
.

Henry’s mother, who worked at the pineapple cannery, said the servicemen weren’t so bad, it was the war workers who were the troublemakers—the machinists, maintenance crews, assembly-line workers, and clerks. “They got a lot of money they don’t know what to do with,” she said.

And his father, who was a steelworker at Pearl Harbor, told him, “Downtown you got thirty-five, forty guys for every girl, so right off the bat they not very happy. So what do they do? They get drunk and fight, that’s what, and you just stay clear of them, Henry. Stay away from Hotel Street. I better not catch you going near that place.”

Henry and Sammy left the horse and headed down toward the bus stop to catch the bus to Hotel Street.

On any one day there were about thirty thousand men crawling around Hotel Street. There was no way in the world Henry’s father could ever find him there. Unless he was down there himself. And if he was, how could he explain that to Henry?

As they walked, the road so hot you could smell the tar, an army jeep with three guys in it passed. Nobody waved to anybody.

Sammy said, “What you going call your horse?”

“Killer.”

“No, if you call it that, it will think it
is
a killer, and once it thinks that, you’ll never get on it. How about Brownie? Or Bucky, since when you ever get on it, it will prob’ly buck you off.” He laughed.

“I like Killer better.”

“I had a cousin named Johnny, but everyone called him Pee-Wee. Because he was so small, yeah?”

“And now I’m supposed to say, what’s that got to do with calling my horse Killer, right?”

“Everything, because since we was all calling him Pee-Wee, he started thinking maybe he was too small for play baseball, too small for football, too small for work cannery, too small for—”

“Kay-okay, get to the point.”

“He ended up as a bookkeeper.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Shhh. Can you imagine writing numbers in a book all day long? Drive me nuts, man.”

“How come you said you
had
a cousin. He’s dead, or what?”

“No, he moved. Mainland. Couldn’t take it.”

“Couldn’t take what?”

“The numbers.”

“Sheese.”

“Here comes the bus.”

It was full, of course. Every bus at every stop on every day was always sweaty full. But they squeezed onto it anyway, rode standing up, packed in like Vienna sausages. Mostly local people were on it, but there were also some war workers and a few military guys, who all looked young, some almost as young as Henry and Sammy.

One guy on the bus was crammed up close to Henry. He was snappy clean in his khaki uniform. Army guy, probably from Schofield Barracks. Henry liked his hat, tilted to the side like it was. The guy caught Henry looking and dipped his chin, Hello.

Henry turned away.

Later Henry glanced at him again. He guessed the guy was probably about nineteen. He had dark hair, almost black. And blue eyes. Henry hadn’t seen that very often, black hair and blue eyes.

“Howdy,” the army guy said to Henry. The guy was just trying to be friendly.

Henry didn’t know what to do.

“My name’s Mike,” the guy said.

Sammy, who was standing right behind Henry, let out a small scoffing sound that said, Can you believe this joker is talking to us?

Henry looked down at his feet.

They rode for thirty minutes more in silence. Once, the driver stopped the bus and got out and smoked a cigarette. They did that because they had so many customers, they didn’t care anymore how they treated them, and everyone waited on the bus, afraid to get off and lose their place. When he was done, the driver got back on and continued on toward Honolulu.

Half the people on the bus got off on Hotel Street, Henry and Sammy among them.

And Mike, who went off by himself. Funny he was by himself, Henry thought. Mostly those guys went around in packs.

“He likes you,” Sammy whispered.

“Shuddup. You’re sick, you know? You need help.”

“Yeah yeah.”

They walked around. It was hot, the street sending up as much heat as the sun. Everyplace you looked was jammed with uniforms, white for navy, khaki for army, everywhere.

“Let’s go check out the tattoo shops,” Sammy said.

“Which ones? There must be fifty of them.”

“All of them got Filipino artists,” Sammy said. “You know, sometimes they do five hundred tattoos a day. You know what’s the most popular?
Remember Pearl Harbor.
”

“How you know that?”

“I know.”

“Shhh. You so full of it, Sammy.”

“No. It’s true. My uncle told me that.”

He was probably right, since Sammy had Filipino blood.

“Hey,” Henry said, “how about Savage?”

“What?”

“The horse. Call him Savage.”

“Junk,” Sammy said. “How ’bout Spats?”

“Spats?”

“He got a white foot.”

“But he only has one.”

“So.”

“So you gotta call him Spat then. Not Spats.”

Sammy frowned. “Sound like somebody spit something.”

“The no-name horse.”

Sammy said, “What did Wong call it?”

“The horse.”

Sammy shook his head. “I still like Bucky.”

A fight broke out in front of a bar. Men yelling and shoving. Henry and Sammy ran over to see. A war worker and a navy guy going at it, but two navy SPs broke it up before it got going. The war worker guy went off looking back and swearing at the navy guy, telling him he better watch his back.

“Look,” Henry said.

Sammy turned around.

Mike.

Mike smiled when he saw them, then came over, saying, “Not much of a fight, huh?”

Henry still didn’t know what to do around Mike, or any service guy who was by himself. He sure didn’t want to talk to him. But he did wonder where he was from. Ohio, probably. Or maybe Iowa. They were all from places like that, at least that’s what his father told him. “From Ohio to the grave,” he’d said. “So sad. They’re just kids. Farmers and grocery store stock boys. Come way out here to fight and die.”

But Henry never thought about that. He didn’t care where they were from. He just knew he didn’t like them. Like the rest of his friends.

“Uh . . . yeah,” Henry said. “The SPs broke it up.”

“So,” Mike said, then said no more.

Sammy turned to walk away.

Henry wanted to go, too, but the guy was just trying to be friendly and, well, he wasn’t so bad. Henry grabbed Sammy’s arm. “Wait.”

Sammy stopped and turned back quickly, like maybe Henry was going to fight the guy.

Henry searched for something to say. Nothing came.

“I hate this street,” Mike said. “Nothing’s real, you know? Don’t it seem that way to you?”

Sammy tugged at Henry’s arm, like, Come on, let’s get out of here, already. We got shoes to shine.

“Yeah,” Henry said to the army guy. “But it’s kind of fun to watch all you guys stand around waiting.”

Mike shook his head. “That’s what we do, ain’t it? Wait. Wait for everything. Wait for a cup of coffee. Wait for a shoe shine. Wait for the war.”

Henry hadn’t ever thought of that before, wait for the war. Strange.

Sammy turned his back to them.

“What’s your name?” the army guy, Mike, asked.

“Henry. And this is Sammy,” he added, pointing a thumb back over his shoulder.

Finally Sammy turned around. He nodded, but cold, like maybe he’d rather spit than talk.

“He’s not as bad as he looks,” Henry said, grinning.

Mike put out his hand to shake.

Henry hesitated, but shook. The guy’s grip was strong. That was good.

Sammy shook, too, reluctantly, and Henry prayed to heaven that his father wasn’t watching from some secret hole in the wall.

“Where you from?” Henry asked, and Sammy threw his head back, like, Jeez, you gotta be kidding, come on, let’s
go.

“Tyler, Texas. Ever heard of it?”

“No. But I heard of Texas.”

Mike nodded, then dipped his head toward the rope hanging out of Henry’s pocket. “What’s the rope for?”

Henry turned to look. He’d forgotten all about it. “Uh . . . oh that . . . I got a horse. Me and Sammy was riding it today.”

Sammy stuffed a laugh.

“No kidding,” Mike said. “What kind of horse is it?”

“A brown one.”

“A brown one?”

“Yeah, brown.”

Mike scratched the back of his head and thought a moment. “You think . . .” He paused, thought some more. “You—you think I could ride your horse? I ain’t seen mine in six months.”