Freckled Page 3

  “Mom!” I scream. “Help!”

  I pick Bonny up and throw her down on my knees again and hit her back as hard as I can. The fish scale flies out of her mouth and out onto the grass, and she starts crying—and that’s when Mom comes running out of the back door.

  “What are you doing, hitting her?” She scoops Bonny into her arms. “She’s just a baby—what are you doing?”

  “She was choking, and I got the fish scale out!” I point to the scale in the grass. “See?”

  Bonny is scared from the whole thing, and the little crying she was doing turns into full-on screaming. Mom’s turning red, her eyes wide, getting ready to whack me, which she only does when she’s really mad. I jump up and run away to grab the fish scale. I hold it up. “She was choking, so I turned her over my knees and hit her back like you showed me, and she spit it out! It flew all the way over here.”

  Pretty soon all three of us are crying, and Pop comes out and I get to tell the story again. I’m proud of saving Bonny. I like the feeling of being a hero.

  Pop takes me to get a shave ice as a reward in nearby Haleiwa. Haleiwa is a dirt road over a little bridge, and the shops are small and colorful with fake fronts and creaky wood porches. I’m so excited. Shave ice is really special because it’s full of sugar, and sugar is badforyou. We walk up to the shave ice truck, and the local guy leans out the window in the side of it. He has a gold tooth in front and a big smile. “What you folks like?”

  Pop reads the choices off the board for me to pick one. “Coconut, lilikoi, pineapple, vanilla, mango, lychee, strawberry, and rainbow.”

  “Rainbow, Uncle! I like rainbow!” The guy laughs because I jump up and down, though I can feel Pop getting irritated.

  “We get ‘em, honey. Just a minute, cuz time fo’ change the ice.” I’m too short to see into the truck, straining and jumping toward the window, so Pop picks me up to watch. I hold very still against his stomach and chest so he won’t put me down—he gets annoyed when I wiggle.

  The guy takes a solid block of ice in a cardboard milk jug, rips the cardboard off, and puts the big, shiny, see-through block in the shaver—a piece of the moon, fallen from the sky, all misty and glowing inside. He winds down on a claw from the top to grip the ice, then cranks a handle on the side. The block spins around and around on a shiny blade, and shave ice flies off into a catcher. Finally, there’s enough to pack into a paper cone, and he hoses the ice down with red strawberry, blue vanilla, and yellow pineapple syrup from bottles with a pointy opening on the end. He hands the giant shave ice cone to me. “So ono, this one. Enjoy, ku`uipo.”

  “Ku`uipo” means sweetheart. I know because Miss K told me so.

  Pop sets me down, and I skip over to the nearby picnic table. Pop and the guy talk story about the surf while Pop gets a shave ice, too. I close my eyes to let the tasty colored flakes, just like fruity moonlight, melt on my tongue. I wish this moment could be always.

  Chapter Four

  Surfer Paradise

  Fern crowns and beach life with Kala and me

  Age: 6, North Shore, Kauai, 1971

  Pop is still going to the University of Hawaii for marine biology, which has something to do with the ocean and is what my mom’s dad Grandpa Garth is a doctor in. Gigi and Grandpa Jim send money for that because they want him to finish college.

  Pop gets more and more grumpy because he says Rocky Point’s getting too crowded. He complains that the Oahu locals are getting gnarly with fights on the beach over waves, which is called “beefing” or “scrapping.” I’ve seen it. The men yell and splash water and then tussle like fighting dogs when they get to the sand.

  I listen to Mom and Pop talking with their surfer friends, other haoles from the Mainland, and they’re worried about drug dealing starting up around Pipeline and Sunset Beach—not pakalolo, which everyone smokes, but other stuff that has a dangerous vibe called horse and LSD and coke. Pop has a shotgun he uses to shoot coconuts off the tree in front of the house, but he doesn’t like handguns or believe in them. Pop gets the idea that everyone is carrying weapons, and things are getting dangerous.

  When Pop gets an idea he’s worried about, he can’t let it go. Nothing seems different to me except there are more surfers, more loud parties, more beach scraps, and sometimes I watch Bonny alone at night.

  They’ve been saving Gigi and Jim’s money and what Mom makes selling puka shell necklaces from shells she picks up on the beach. They’ve been talking to their Australian surfer friend, Rusty Miller, about going to Australia, a country somewhere far away with good waves and kangaroos. But Rusty moved to Kauai and told them to come there instead because the waves are great on Kauai, and no one has discovered it yet.

  To get ready for Kauai, Pop drops out of the University of Hawaii and buys a new van with the money they saved for Australia, a big white Ford Econoline. He builds an inside with wood lining the walls and a built-in bed and padded bench for storage that I will sleep on. There are cupboards, and a food prep area under the big raised bed that you can get to by opening the back doors. Mom makes beautiful red flowered curtains for the windows, and it looks cozy, like everywhere Mom decorates. We get rid of almost everything except some boxes we send to Lihue on Kauai and put in storage for when we get a house. “We’ll ship the van over and live in it, and we can figure out where we want to settle on the island,” Pop says.

  I say goodbye to Janet, and my guinea pig SoShell, the little house with the big windows that watch the ocean, and the big sleepy cat of warm beach.

  We drive and camp all over Kauai, from the tops of the mountains in Koke`e to the massive cliffs and sand dunes of Polihale on the west side. When we find Tunnels Beach on the north shore of the island, with its great surf and nearby park with running water and toilets, Mom and Pop declare they’ve found Rocky Point—only better, because there are hardly any other surfers out at the perfect, peeling break beyond the reef where we fish and dive.

  Pop has brought his camera to take photos of the Kauai surfers and sell them like he did on Oahu, but Kauai is a very different island than Oahu. On Oahu, surfers like being in the magazines, but not here. Some of “da local boyz” tell Pop they’ll beat him up if he sends anything from Kauai to the magazines.

  “I get it. The surf is so great, of course they don’t want anybody to know about it, or pretty soon it’ll be as crowded as Oahu,” Pop tells Mom when he comes back from an early morning talk with other surfers in the parking lot in front of Hanalei Bay, a spot with a nice right-hand break. “But I was counting on being able to make some money for us as a photographer.”

  There’s no work for Mom or Pop on Kauai. No jobs that the locals aren’t already doing, and our application for food stamps hasn’t come through. Gigi and Grandpa Jim have stopped sending money except for Pop’s three hundred a month trust fund. They wouldn’t approve of our situation, or that I even know about it, but my parents don’t believe in hiding things.

  It’s been a month since we moved to Kauai, and today we’ve run out of everything to eat but a little bit of brown rice.

  We leave Hanalei and drive the steep, windy two-lane road for miles along the coast to pull up at Tunnels. Pop takes a hidden dirt driveway he found next to a Java plum grove and parks the van at the edge of the beach under the ironwood and kamani trees.

  These trees are some of the only ones that really like it right by the ocean. Mom says the ironwoods, tall and gray with long, soft, swishing needles, came from Australia. The kamani, with their wide, paddle-like leaves, have been here so long people have forgotten where they came from. I’ve never much cared about either, but I like the kamanis better because the ironwoods have little hard cones that really hurt my bare feet. “Haole feet” is what the locals call that soreness. I hate wearing shoes and am trying to get my feet to be tougher.

  I grab my red scoop net and run down to the reef in my usual outfit—a cotton swimsuit bottom Mom made for me, no top. I don’t see why I should wear one just ‘cause I’m
a girl. My chest looks the same as a boy.

  Pop takes his throw net and heads down the beach to try to catch fish, and Mom stays in the van with Bonny. I walk out onto the low-tide reef, picking my barefoot way across coral worn flat by pounding surf, scanning the clear water. I’m looking for something—anything—to eat. Hopefully one of us will catch something for dinner, or there won’t be anything, and I have a hard time sleeping with my tummy growling and chewing on itself.

  I bend over a tide pool, peering under the ledge of coral into purple dark. Sometimes, if I’m very lucky, lobsters hide there, and I can spot them by their long, waving antennae. Green striped manini and silvery aholehole flee as my shadow falls over the sandy bottom, and I get so close to the water that my hair trails on it like floating gold seaweed.

  Nothing here. I move on to another tide pool and spot a motion in the water like the whirl a toilet makes going down. A surge happens, then stops. It happens again, with a rhythm to it like something breathing. My heart speeds up at this discovery—but I have no idea what it is.

  Walking carefully so as not to accidentally step on a wana sea urchin or tubeworms that cut round holes in my feet, I creep around and approach the pool from behind, so my shadow never falls on the water and spooks the fish.

  The movement happens again, a surge like a tiny pump hidden in the rocks.

  I peer down, feeling the sun on my bare back, my hair floating on the water, and I see an octopus’s arm feeling along the sandy bottom. It’s as big around as my dad’s thumb, pale as the yellow-white sand, and dappled with brown spots. My mouth waters at the sight. I’m hungry. I’ve never eaten tako before, but I know they can be eaten.

  I slide a hand into the hole where the creature’s hiding and grab whatever’s there.

  There’s a flurry in the water. The part of the octopus’s body that I’ve grabbed is cool and slimy, and there’s a tightening sensation as one of the sucker parts wraps around my arm like a whip, pulling me forward, and I stumble into the deep tide pool.

  This thing’s a lot bigger than I thought! I’m just a little girl and maybe I should not have tried this by myself. I can’t let go, though, because the octopus is pulling deeper into its hole under the reef and if I let go, it will get away. I look frantically around for help.

  My dad has gone much further down on the reef; I can barely see him in the distance. There’s no one anywhere near on the empty arc of beach, with its backdrop of drip-castle mountains robed in shades of green. The big white van under the trees looks deserted; the red flowered curtains are closed. Bonny’s only two, and Mom is probably napping with her.

  Gonna have to do it myself.

  I reach into the water and grab the thing with my other hand, too, and step fully into the tide pool. I brace my feet against the coral bottom, and pull and wrestle and pull and wrestle, tearing off a limb that twitches, writhing in the water, but doesn’t bleed. And inch by gradual, panting inch, I drag the creature out of its hole.

  Its tentacles writhe up and down my arms and I’m covered with red circles from the suckers when I finally haul my prize out of the hole and up onto the reef. Color flashes over it, and I’m almost hypnotized by the way it turns blue, purple, green, and yellow by turns. Gouts of inky black blood keep squirting out from underneath, and I hope it’s not poisonous.

  But tako can be eaten. The local people make it into a chopped-up blend of salad called poke, and they fry it with bread crumbs too. I hold the octopus around the middle, suckering and so heavy, trying to crawl down my belly and legs to get away. I run to shore, trying to keep the tentacles off me, but it’s too big and strong. Once the creature’s far enough up the beach not to escape, I peel it off and drop it in the sand, running to the van and hollering. “I caught an octopus! I caught an octopus!”

  I wake Mom from her nap, and Pop comes back at our yelling. He kills the octopus by stabbing it in the slippery, round head with his fishing knife. The octopus’s eye, large and sparkly bronze, looks at me and is beautiful as it dies. I feel a quiver of doubt that I did the right thing, a stab of sadness, but my parents’ obvious delight over the future meal fills me with pride.

  I did it. All by myself.

  Pop flips the creature over and shows me a hidden parrotlike bill right in the middle of all those sucker-covered arms. “Don’t let the bill get you,” he says. “They have a mean bite.”

  I had no idea the octopus had a biter like that. My eyes bug out in delayed fright, and the red marks on my arms burn and sting. I’m cold all of a sudden in my bare skin and wet cotton suit; the sun has gone behind the green triangle peak of Makana Mountain, but I can’t wrap up in one of the towels.

  There’s a strict way we do towels. We each have our own, and we can only use it after we’ve rinsed off in fresh water. The county park’s a good half-mile walk down the beach for me to shower, and Mom notices my shivering as I watch Pop clean the guts out of the octopus and chop it up. She washes me off with water from a plastic milk jug that’s still a little sun-warm, and I wrap up in “my” towel, crunchy from multiple dryings.

  “So, how do we cook this thing?” Mom’s made a hole in the sand lined with rocks and got a beach fire going. We have a little stove, too, the green kind you fill with kerosene and pump, but it’s too small to handle anything as big as the octopus.

  “Not sure. I’ve always had octopus chopped up in something or deep fried with bread crumbs,” Pop says. There is nothing to go with it: no vegetables, butter, not even bread crumbs—just Spike All Purpose Seasoning from the health food store. “Maybe we can grill it.”

  “Cook it on a stick?” I ask, but they decide the nearby branches of the ironwood trees are too difficult to poke through the tough, rubbery meat.

  “Let’s boil it.” Mom crams all the arms of the octopus into our too-small pot, the pot we use for everything. The tentacles hanging out make us laugh, but she keeps them in with the lid, and sticks the pot on the fire, resting it on a wire grill.

  She boils the octopus for a long time.

  And she boils it some more, because when she pokes it, it’s still hard.

  She adds water and boils it again.

  Full dark has come. The moon gleams on the black ocean, and the tide comes in, and the fire burns down. Finally, we are just too hungry to hope it will get any better.

  Pop hacks the rubbery mass into chunks and we chew it, laughing because it’s so tough it bounces your teeth away. It’s slimy as well as rubbery, and tastes like smoky salt water. We eat the whole thing. I fall asleep easily that night, tummy full, on my bed that’s a storage bench during the day.

  Chapter Five

  Van Living

  Me reading big books

  Age 6: North Shore, Kauai, 1971

  Our toys are in storage in Lihue waiting for when we have a house, so for now we don’t have much to play with. I miss my familiar bedroom, but I also like the feeling of exploring, of never quite knowing what we’ll be doing each day.

  Bonny follows me around as much as she can. I’m impatient with how young she is at only two, but I love her fiercely. Janet was right—she’s my best friend. But we are so different: I’m salt to her sweet.

  My pale freckled skin, daubed with zinc oxide or PABA from the health food store, burns easily.

  Hers is the even light brown of a Nilla Wafer cookie.

  My hair, bleached by sun and ocean to palest orange, is so fine it drifts on the air.

  Bonny’s hair is a thick, creamy white-blonde she wears instead of clothing.

  I am wiry and strong and always moving.

  She is softer and moves thoughtfully.

  Bonny sucks her finger and watches me with Pop’s green eyes. She’s not like I am—needing to touch and understand everything. “Buddha baby,” Mom and Pop have always called her.

  I come up with ideas for us to do. “How about we build a fort under the ironwood roots?” I love forts. I make them everywhere.

  “No.” Bonny removes her finger
from her mouth with a pop, just long enough to get the word out.

  “How about we make horses out of sticks and ride them around?”

  “No.” This time she shakes her head, too. She doesn’t like that I’m much faster at anything involving running.

  “We can make Barbie houses in the sand.”

  Now she nods. We treasure our Barbies, with their silky hair that melts if you get it too close to the fire, and tans that make me think of Sugar Daddy candy. Mom doesn’t like how “objectifying” their bodies are, with their ice cream cone breasts, flat butts and long legs with toes already pointed for high heels. The afternoon passes happily as we dig holes and make furniture out of coral, dressing the Barbies in outfits of leaves held together with pieces of vine.

  We still haven’t found a house, but it doesn’t matter because we’re okay living in the van by Tunnels Beach. Mom and Pop surf in the morning while I watch Bonny. We aren’t allowed out of the van until they return. Pop takes one of his three boards, and Mom surfs on an inflatable mat with green rubber Churchill fins.

  When they get back, Mom fixes breakfast on the camp stove, usually oatmeal with dried fruit chopped up in it. Pop goes fishing or throw netting to get fish to trade or eat, or we drop him off at a construction site to pound nails, or at someone’s farm to pick papayas or chainsaw trees.

  Mom picks up puka shells on the beach for the necklaces she sells to people. Bonny and I help find pukas. I like crawling along the sand to pick up the round, white discs with holes in them, the spiral ends of cone shells worn apart in the surf. When strung, they look like smooth rolls of Indian wampum we read about in a book, pale as pearls against Mom’s deep tan.