Clay's Way (17 page)

I roll my eyes at him for being so vain, and walk away with my mind set on winning Anar’s admiration away from him.  I’ll read him my poetry if I have to.

Chapter 17

Pine falls from fire,

Smoke turns clear blue sky dark gray

Seeds cultivated.

              We build a fire that lights up our faces with the same warm glow as a rising sun. Clay pretends he’s a young, but wise Hawaiian prince and tells scary stories about Hawaiian legends, with a spooked-out look on his face for effect.

              “
Ka
 
huakai
 
o ka
 
po
,” he sings in a guttural whisper, “the marchers of the night.  My mom’s friend saw them here before.  Picture this.  A strong wind blows, like tonight, to clear the path for dead chiefs, retracing their ceremonial marches from the outrigger canoes to the mountains.  Burning torches, red and intense.  I think tonight is 
Po Kane
, the 20-seventh phase of the moon.  That’s when they march.  Between sunset and two.”  He jerks his head up and looks up to the cliff.  “I saw something!”  He points to the ridge.

              Anar looks up quickly.

              “It’s some dumb ass hippie with a lantern.”  I act like the stories don’t scare me, and I’ve heard them a million times before, but they feel really possible here on this isolated beach.  I could scream as loud as I possibly could and still miss the ears of civilization by miles.  I feel both trapped and protected here, by the churning sea on one side and the steep cliffs and sharp volcanic mountains on the other.

              Clay holds his hand up, palm facing us, as if he’s about to enlighten us.

              A dog stops playing and looks at him.

              “Remember, if you see them, don’t look them in the eyes.  Take off all your clothes and lie flat on the ground.  If you’re lucky, they’ll ignore you.”  He sticks a big piece of gnarled driftwood in the fire till the tip glows bright orange, then he stands and traces petroglyphs in the air.  The hot ember makes trails in the darkness of turtles and birds.  “We should be safe.  I think.”  He talks with a Hawaiian pidgin accent, so we’re more likely to believe his made-up ritual. 

              I look at Anar and roll my eyes. 

              Anar dismisses me and looks at Clay, attentively, like he knows something more than everyone else who lives here. 

              He doesn’t, and fuck hippie ass Anar for acting like he does.  

              “Where’d you learn about all that?”  Anar’s really into this.

              Clay loves his loyalty and rewards him with attention, snapping out of his scary mode.  “Friends, personal experience, surfing.”

              I want to laugh.

              “Where you from?” Clay asks, like he’s equally fascinated by Anar.

              “My parents live on Maui.  We’ve lived there since I was 12.”

              Oh, he’s one of 
those
.  He’s rich, smokes a lot of pot and has ultra-liberal hippie parents.  He’s kinda confused, his parents give him no guidance at all, and he spends all his energy trying really hard to be cool, even though he lives in the middle of nowhere and has no idea how normal people live.

              “Cool, man.  I love Maui.”  Clay says that about every island.  “The Garden Isle.” 

              What a dork.  All the islands have these nicknames that are supposedly what the ancient Hawaiians called them, but I think the Tourist Board thought them up.  Whenever someone says one of the names, I get cold chills of embarrassment.

              “It’s cool.  Really beautiful.  You guys from Oahu?”

              “Yeah, Kailua.  It sucks.”  I have to put an end to this every-place-is-lovely bullshit.  All I can think of is my prison-like school, macho Samoans driving around picking on kids, blond muscle surferboys in pickup trucks with “Kailua Boys” stickers on the back- a stupid gang that beats their girlfriends and talk like Hawaiians even though they’re white. 

              “It doesn’t suck.  Cool brahs, hot chicks, good waves.  Windward breezes keep your mind clear.” 

              If he says, the Gathering Place, Oahu’s nickname, I swear I’ll throw up. 

              He shows Anar his arm, half-way flexed, with a tattoo of Oahu with a big plumaria flower where Kailua is.  He flexes more as Anar takes it into his hands.  He glances up at me for a second to see if I notice his flexed arm.

              I flash him a mean look, trying to make him feel stupid about flexing.  “You don’t really like it, Clay, you just don’t know any other way.” 

              He ignores me.  He grabs a stick and throws it for this hyper dog to fetch, then he gets down on all fours and encourages a tug-of-war. 

              The dog growls. 

              “Watch this, Anar.  I have a connection with dogs.”  He speaks in a really friendly voice, kind of how Anar talks, like everything is equally interesting and sharing your thoughts is healthy and it’s fun to share because then you get more back from others, and all that stupid hippie shit.  He’s being totally fake, as he molds into the appropriate version of Clay to make Anar feel important.  He grabs the dog’s face.  “You remind me of Sharky, boy.”

              Anar watches him.  He looks amused and entertained, like it’s really fun to watch some guy play with a dirty mutt in the sand. 

              This is really sick.  I’ve seen how different Clay is around his friends, but that’s pretty easy to accept and pretty normal, too, for a surfer in Hawaii who listens to punk rock music, parties a lot, and smokes weed, but I had no idea he had the capability of being this peaceful, sensitive hippie boy.  I don’t want to know this.  This is almost pathetic.  Is nothing sacred?  Why’s he have to be so brilliant at such a fucked-up skill?  A genius of deception.  That sounds like the name of a movie or something, or a book about a man with three separate families, all in different states. 

              I feel betrayed.  Why can’t he be a genius at expressing himself, making me feel loved and cared about?  He fooled me. 

“If you look straight into their eyes, you can see their souls.”  Clay says to Anar, trying to hold the unwilling dog’s face to his. 

              I was the idiot who believed him when he said I was cool and cool-looking and interesting to him and smart and funny and that he liked me for me, which is totally rare.  I was seeing an act.  Seeing him convert to hippie-dom puts an entirely new slant on the rest of his personality.  What came off before as spaced-out surferboy, now seems like overly open-minded and downright desperate, which I really hate in people.

              “You into drumming, you know bongos and all that shit?  A went with my best brah to Maui last year and everyone was drumming.  It’s really cool, under the stars--the ancient tribal rhythm.”

              “Yeah, I know a couple guys that are into it.”

              “I’d like to get into that shit.”  Clay nods a couple times. 

              What a lie.  He hates hippies.  Well, he did yesterday and every other day before that.  He’s making me lose trust in people, like a dog that’s been beaten too many times.  The dog just walks around like the victim with its tail between its legs.  That’s going to be me.

              “It’s really cool meeting you, dude.  I like to meet all different types of people.”   

              I want to punch Clay in the face till he bleeds.  I want to rip off his clothes right here on the spot and unmask him.  On one side of me, I feel high pressure, cold and dry, and on the other, low pressure that’s warm and humid.  A front’s moving in.  If a tornado materializes right here on 
Kalalau
 beach, I won’t be surprised.

              “You guys been friends a long time?” Anar innocently asks.  He’s interested in us.  He’s curious. 

              Maybe, I should lie to him and tell him that Clay and I just met on the hike, so we all start on equal ground, or maybe I should totally exaggerate our friendship, make it sound like we’re brothers, practically.  I’m definitely not telling him that we do it sometimes or that I’m in love with him. 

              He doesn’t deserve to know that, yet, if ever.

              I make my way out of the haze of thought.  “Yeah, well, we knew each other when I was like 12, then we didn’t see each other till last year.”  I want Anar to know that he’s nowhere close to knowing Clay as well as I do, but I don’t want to lie to the point where I’ll forget what I said and get caught.  Other people always remember what I say much better than I do. 

              “I’m glad you guys showed up.  I was going crazy with my sister and her friend.  All they wanna do is meet guys.  They’re so boring.”  With a dumb smile, Anar watches Clay play with the dog.  He looks at Clay with an admiration that even I find incredibly naive. 

              Maybe Clay should go out with him.  He could just do what he wants without having to feel judged and dissected. 

              Love should be simple like that, I guess.  I forget how to feel love as a simple emotion.  For me, love’s a jumbled mass of hidden feelings, indirect motivation, and uncontrollable lust.  “How old’s your sister?”

              “20-one.  She’s a nursing student.” 

              “I hate nurses,” I say to him quietly, so Clay doesn’t hear.

              “Oh?”  He doesn’t know the full impact of my declaration.  “You have any brothers or sisters?” he asks.

              “No.  Thank God.  The house is already too small for just me and my parents.  I need a lot of space, you know, to have a clear mind.”  I sound like Clay.

              Yeah, it’s hard living in one big room with my parents.”

              Clay looks up all the sudden.  “How do you jack off?”  Of course he had to bring up Anar’s dick that asshole.  I bet he wants to see it.  I hate him for it.  He runs after the dog toward the ocean.

              Now I can’t stop picturing Anar naked and coming up with dumb, see-through schemes to get him into the tent alone.  I get a boner as I picture Clay and Anar sucking each other off.  What’s happening to me?

              Clay looks up at me and Anar talking, but he’s too far away to hear us. 

              I smile and laugh trying to make him think I’m having a great time with him and that Anar’s mine, not his.

              Clay jogs away, throwing the stick for the dog to fetch down the beach. 

              I want to ask him where he’s going or chase after him, but I can’t.  He’ll see my insecurity if I do and he’ll know I’m just playing a game to make him jealous.  I have to be strong, inflexible, and expressionless if I’m going to win. 

              Anar watches Clay run down the beach past several campfires, getting smaller and smaller as he passes through orange pools of light with different groups hanging around each one.  “Do you believe that stuff about night marchers?”

              Here’s my chance to have some control around here.  “There are people who swear they have seen them.  I don’t know.  Weirder shit happens in Hawaii.”  Like me going insane.

              “Yeah, I guess so.”

              “You have a girlfriend?”  I ask strongly, like Clay would.

              “Nope.  Never have.”

              “What do you mean, never?”

              “Never liked anyone.”  He looks like he feels uncomfortable and shy and wishes I’d stop the quiz show now.  His restlessness only makes me wanna make him even more uncomfortable and feel the power of intimidation that I so rarely get to experience.  It’s mean, I know, but I can’t help it.  A weird part of me needs to fill in for Clay’s rude comments and bad attitude while he’s gone. 

              “So what’s the deal?  How could you never like anyone?  There must be some hot girls on Maui.”  I can’t believe I’m doing this.  I’ll rot in hell. 

              Anar looks away from me and down to his hands. 

              “I don’t know.”

              “I’ve heard stories about Maui girls.”  I smile at him and wink, and almost immediately want to crawl in a hole and hide for acting so aggressive.

              “Whatever story you heard about 
Maui girls
,” he exaggerates Maui girls and makes me feel stupid for trying to be so cool or whatever, “has to be total bullshit.”  He probably thinks I’m a real asshole, or maybe he knows I’m putting on an act, which would be even more humiliating.

              I want to start over with him.  I’ve made hanging out with him a burden.  I have to keep tabs on all the lies I’ve told and things I’ve said to make my character believable and have continuity.  I have to lighten this up.  “So, how long are you gonna camp here?”

              “A couple more days.  We’ve already been here for three.”

              I can tell by the lack of bullshit in his head and the golden color of his skin that he’s telling the truth. 

              Tiny crystals of salt make his eyebrows sparkle in the firelight. 

              I want to lick them off. 

              “How long are you guys staying?” he asks with anticipation.

              “I don’t know.  Whenever I get sick of it.”

              Clay comes running up and throws me a bottle of beer, which almost slams into my face, then he stops and presents another one to Anar, like he’s a waiter trying to get a good tip.  “There’s some cool Australian guys over there.  I taught them how to say 
vagina
 in Hawaiian.”  He does a couple karate chops, then sits down on the sand and lies back looking up to the almost full moon.

              Anar asks, “How?”

              “Duh, 
pu
 
nani
.  Who doesn’t know that?”  I can see the shape of Clay’s dick through his shorts, and the thickening of his torso in his chest, lit by the fire. 

              Anar watches him, waiting for the next words he speaks, like they’re important. 

              I’m jealous of how laid back Clay can be around strangers. 

              He doesn’t care that Anar saw him naked, which makes me feel replaceable.