Rolling Hills
Legally, John was a father. Actually, a step-father, or to be perfectly clear, a second step-father. Physically, he was as fit as Tarzan, sea-smart, way-cool, powerful and rugged. Emotionally, he was closed, a guessing game. Socially, he engaged with humor and animation when within his circle of manly friends. But at home, he was a fence post.
Right after my mom married him, we left O’ahu for the Big Island. I was twelve. He was twenty-five.
We moved in with my grandmother after cruising in to Kailua-Kona on John’s new charter fishing boat. Grandma, my mother’s mother, lived in the sleepy town of Holualoa, four miles up the jungled flank of Hualalai, a sleeping, but not-quite-inert volcano.
Even though I’d gotten dog-barf seasick on the first day of our two-day boat ride over from O’ahu, I’d done much better the next day. As we approached Kailua harbor, I made my way to the bow and stood with the wind in my face, one hand holding the dock line for support. I felt like Ben-Hur in his triumphant chariot, riding toward adoration and reward. I decided I liked being on the boat, and hoped John would let me be his deckhand. I knew he could see that I had pretty good sea legs and could scramble around the boat with ease, even along the narrow port and starboard sides. I knew that because one time he looked at me and grunted, which I took to be a good sign.
John managed to secure a permanent mooring in the harbor, which was nothing more than a small buoy attached to a concrete block on the sand below. Each morning, John took a small skiff out to get his boat. He then tied the skiff to the buoy and brought the boat in to the pier. At the end of the day the process was reversed. Getting the boat in the morning and putting it to sleep at the end of the day was a simple thing, but it painted the most dreamy memories in the stained glass chapel of my consciousness.
One day John woke me early.
“Get up.”
I popped out of bed instantly. This was very early on in John’s chore of being my step-father, back when he was still appeasing my mom by teaching me a few things about the boat. “He’s a boy, John,” I heard my mom say. “He needs to learn how to do things boys do, and I don’t know how to do that.”
Mom didn’t know me very well. I had a master’s degree worth of boy-stuff knowledge from my wild days back on O’ahu. But I didn’t bring that up because I wanted her to keep nagging John about how I needed to learn man things. I wanted John’s kind of knowledge. I wanted to be sea-smart and rugged, just like he was.
John grew up a loner on Kauai. His father was a doctor, and his mother hired a nanny who often tied John to a tree to keep him from straying. Even so, he strayed.
At seven, he was fishing off a beach with his small throw net when he saw a large fish racing toward shallow water, trying to escape a shark that was closing in on it. John crouched with his net on his shoulder, ready to throw. He angled closer, and when the fish was as near as it would get, John threw the net. The fish got tangled up in it and John struggled it to shore as the shark shot back into deeper waters. John hauled the huge fish in, capturing what the shark could not … a 65-pound ahi (tuna) … caught in a throw net by a seven year old!
At seven, I was playing in the mud and reading comic books.
But today, John was taking me with him to clean out the bilge on the boat. I followed him out to his car, a 1954 MG two-seat convertible.
The sky had just begun to lighten behind the mountain as we headed down the jungly old winding falling-apart road to the harbor. Soon the sun would breach the summit and pour its gold over the highland coffee farms and cattle pastures and on down to paint the deep dark sea with mind-blowing blues.
Whenever a rat-eyed mongoose raced across the road, John swerved to hit it, leaving more than one squashed mongoose in his rear view mirror. To him, they were akin to rats or toe-sized cockroaches. Pests to be eradicated.
About halfway down to sea level, when the weeds and trees got drier, John slowed. I sat low in the MG and could see everything in the weedy grasses along my side of the road.
We’d passed no other cars that morning, coming or going. Nobody walking, no dogs or even cows. I saw maybe three houses, though there were more hidden down muddy driveways that vanished into the jungle. But for the chattering chorus of birds above in the trees, the thick wet, and now dry jungle on both sides of the road was dead still.
John slowed to a crawl as he reached over his shoulder and pulled out the .22 rifle that he carried with him in his car. He kept it loaded with spread shot, not bullets. He rested the rifle butt-down on his right knee, muzzle to the sky, his finger on the trigger guard.
Half watching the road, his eyes swept the trees that hovered over us, trees alive with doves and mynah birds, chattering and flitting from here to there. I didn’t know if John was going to shoot them or the next mongoose that sprang out of the weeds.
Neither of us had said a word since we left the house. Silence was his way, and it was becoming mine. Men are rough. They say little. They fish. They grunt and smirk. They hunt.
Without stopping, John raised the rifle and shot into the trees. A hundred or more birds exploded up and outward. And a single dove tumbled to the road behind us. John braked and shot again, and another dove fell. Two doves on the road.
“Pick them up,” he said.
I turned to him. “Me?”
“They can’t hurt you.”
I wasn’t thinking of getting hurt. I just didn’t want to pick them up. It was creepy.
“They’re dead. Go on.”
I got out of the car.
They weren’t dead. They were both flapping around on the road. It made me sick to see them jerking like that. I almost couldn’t look.
“Hurry up!”
“But they’re still alive.”
“Pick them up by their feet and put them in the back.”
I did as he said and laid them on an old towel on the floor behind my seat. By then, they’d both stopped twitching. We drove on.
John shot again, but didn’t hit anything. He didn’t say anything either, not until we got down to the pier when he told me to wrap the doves in the towel and leave them in the car.
When we got home later that day, John unwrapped the birds and looked them over. He grunted, then said, “Take them in the garage and pluck out the feathers. Take out any pellets, too.”
The birds were good and dead by then and looking at them was easier. But touching them wasn’t. I re-wrapped them in the dirty towel and took them to the garage, an open-sided carport with a gravel floor. I put the towel on a bench and stared at it.
I did not want to do this.
I didn’t want John to call me some kind of sissy, either, which he would most certainly do, and he’d do it in front of my mom and sisters. I unwrapped the towel. It took a few minutes to pick one of the birds up.
It was light. Its feathers were soft, but they felt dead. I could see where the spread shot had hit it. Pluck out the feathers. I’d never done such a thing before. I’d never even thought of doing it. On TV, Daniel Boone shot and cleaned birds all the time. It was how they lived in pioneer days. But here? Now? In real life?
It was harder than I’d thought it would be. Those feathers did not come out easily. I had to yank them out, the skin stretching until the feather finally popped free. It took me about thirty minutes to pluck two small doves. When I was done, I tried to dig out the pellets, which was also creepy, because birds with no feathers are waxy.
Even so, I did it. I plucked both birds and cleaned them with water from the hose. But I did not feel rugged. I did not feel like a hunter. I did not feel manly.
That night, John cooked them on his small hibachi and served them as a kind of side dish with dinner. I stared at my small portion. It looked like chicken. It might have been tasty, too, but I will never know. I did not — could not — touch it.
John wasn’t being consciously cruel by shooting doves. He was just doing what he’d learned to do growing up on his own. He killed birds and ate them, just like he ate the fish he’d caught. He also rid the world of rats and mongooses, a mission he shared with many people. But I just wasn’t like that. Not then, not now. In fact, I couldn’t possibly ever be like that.
After dinner, John retreated to the living room and sat alone in his chair with the latest copy of National Geographic. A manly man. The man I thought I wanted to be. Rugged. Powerful. Sea-smart. Silent.
Shush! The king is reading.