The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (38 page)

He showed me the paints, explaining the different textured papers for the watercolors, and how to treat them first with a clear wash and then how to apply the colors. He showed me how to go about mixing pigments to make my own oils, and he gave me charcoal and taught me to sketch.

I was transported into a new world. I stopped riding the gulches with Kahanu and instead began to
draw and paint. I was obsessed by it. It took me over completely. And again I was happy.

Jack never returned to Kalani in those years before he went to college. I don’t know whether Archer got wind of his murderous intentions toward me before my allotted time was up, but he was kept out of the way, and life was peaceful. When my drunken art tutor had to be deported back to Honolulu with a severe attack of delirium tremens, Archer made sure that I had a stock of art supplies. He wanted me kept quiet and happy enough not to cause trouble.

In that peaceful period, before I was fifteen, I painted my memories of the Villa Mimosa. I painted Nanny Beale as I remembered her, and the nursery with Fido on my bed and Nanny’s rocking chair by the fire. I painted Kalani’s lush green gorges spanned by rainbows, and the showy red cardinal that came to sit on the lanai rail every evening, hoping for tidbits. I painted Maluhia combing her long, silken black hair, and the beauty of a broken hibiscus blossom; I painted Kahanu on a galloping mare. Everything I saw offered a new perspective, a new detail, a new way to use color.

“You have a special way of seeing things,” Maluhia told me, because when she looked at her portrait, it was not exactly the young woman she saw in the mirror. She knew that instead, I had captured something of the girl she was in her heart.

I was left pretty much to my own devices during those years. Kahanu had taught me well, and though I was still thin, I possessed a deceptive, wiry strength. I could ride any horse and rope cattle as well as any paniolo, but, after being kept a virtual prisoner on the island for ten years, I was a rough country boy, unused to life in a normal society. I ate peasant meals from banana leaves and wore ragged shorts and slept mostly in the stable loft. Maluhia saw to it
that I kept myself clean and that such clothes as I had were laundered. And she insisted that I not use the island patois but speak “properly” and without the sweet Hawaiian lilt. Still, I was an island boy. I was a young savage.

Then Archer came to the island, and this time he brought Jack with him. Jack was nineteen, and I was fifteen. There were ten long years of hatred between us as we looked at each other. Lauohomelemele and Ikaikakukane—the “Yellow-haired One” and the “One of Manly Strength.”

Archer was drinking heavily by then. He ordered dinner to be served and insisted that I sit with them. He was always smart in his custom-tailored white sharkskin suits, his panama hats, and handmade shirts, and even though the night was hot, he was wearing an elegant dark blue flowered shirt of Chinese silk. And Jack was the perfect suave young college man in an immaculate white linen shirt and linen pants.

Archer was still a handsome man, though the liquor was beginning to show in the puffiness under his eyes and the tremor that afflicted his right hand after he had downed a few shots of his favorite scotch whiskey. And Jack was handsome all right. Tall, blond, and strong-jawed.

His hard blue eyes simmered with hate as he looked at me in my old shirt, faded by the sun and many washings from blue to a soft gray, and the rough denim shorts that had once been his and were now worn to a smooth and I thought pleasing pale blue. Thanks to Maluhia, they were immaculate, and I was freshly showered and saw nothing wrong in my appearance—until I looked at the two of them in their finery.

Archer was on his fourth or fifth scotch. His hand shook with a fine, insistent tremor as he pointed at me and guffawed. “Put that wild boy in a roomful of
civilized folk in Honolulu or San Francisco,” he yelled, “and they’ll say, ‘You know what? Archer Kane was right. That boy is a savage. He
must
be soft in the head.’”

“For chrissake, get out of here,” Jack snarled, looking at me as though I were a leper. “You’re not fit to be in our company.”

“No, no. Sit down, boy.” Archer grinned genially at me. “Tell me, what are you up to these days?”

“I help Kahanu with the Thoroughbreds. I ride with the paniolos. I fish for food for the table,” I said.

Archer erupted in laughter. “There, what did I tell you? Wasn’t I right about him? Well, kid, I guess you had better go back to the stables and the paniolos where you’re comfortable. They say every man seeks his own level in life, and I see that you have found yours.”

With that, he turned his back on me and snapped his fingers for Maluhia to bring his food.

I glared resentfully at him over my shoulder as I made my way back to the stables. I hated the disparaging way he treated Maluhia almost more than I hated his cruel attitude toward me. But I could do nothing about either. “Get out of here, you hick,” Jack yelled viciously after me. “You’re an ignorant pig, an eyesore in your hand-me-down shorts. You’re not fit to sit at the table with civilized men.”

I knew Archer and Jack sat late on the lanai, discussing business and drinking. Nevertheless, early the next morning they were at the stables, where Kahanu had their horses saddled up and waiting. I lurked inside the stalls, hoping not to be noticed, and they soon went off with Kahanu to inspect the cattle.

For the next few days I managed to keep out of their way, and they did not ask for me. I rode out early with the paniolos and often slept out with
them, under the stars on a grassy hillside. Life was simple and sweet away from the plotting and sophisticated corruption of the Kanes, and I thought that if I had no more than this, I could be happy.

Then Archer went back to Honolulu, and Jack was alone again. So, of course, he came looking for me.

It was late evening as I rode back with the men, sweat-soaked and smelling like a steer from a long, hot day spent branding the new cattle. There were only a dozen paniolos on Kalani, and they were older men who had been sent over from the Kanoi Ranch on the Big Island and given the easier job of caring for Archer Kane’s prize herd. Archer’s philosophy was that it was no use wasting the cowboys’ lifetime-earned skills by putting them out to pasture themselves and wasting money on pensions. He figured they were still able to work, and Archer got his money’s worth instead of paying them retirement pensions.

I’ll say this for Archer Kane: He was a good rancher. He understood his business, and he understood his men. Those old guys would have withered and died without their jobs to go to, and Archer understood they would rather work and make an honest week’s pay doing the only thing they knew than be turfed off the ranch, living in some broken-down shanty village, talking about the old days. They hated him all right, everybody did, but he gave them what they wanted, and in return they worked hard and kept their mouths shut.

Now, when they saw Jack waiting for me, they turned their eyes away, concentrating on their horses, giving them buckets of freshwater and throwing blankets over them, allowing them to cool off before feeding them.

Jack was leaning back with his elbows hooked over the corral fence, one foot propped on the rail, smiling
a sinister little smile. “Hey, Monkey,” he called. “Come over here. I want to talk to you.”

I walked slowly toward him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the paniolos sidling away into the stables. Jack and I were alone. Then, with a sudden thrill, I realized that for the first time I was not afraid of him.

“What’s all this I hear about you painting?” he said coldly.

I came a step closer. I stood with my legs apart, my arms folded. “What about it?” I demanded, looking him squarely in the eye.

“You are here to work, not to paint,” he snarled. He tilted his arrogant chin, pushing his cowboy hat to a better angle, looking down his nose at me. I measured him up: He was six-one to my five-seven and around 190 pounds of solid muscle to my thin, wiry 130. His jaw jutted aggressively, and the urge to hit him almost overwhelmed me. I hid my bunched fists and said instead, “Archer knows about the painting. Who do you think supplies the paints?”

“Well, no longer,” he said. He pointed triumphantly to a pile of rubble lying in the corner of the yard. “There’ll be no more ‘painting’ on this island, you fuckin’ little pansyboy. You’ll earn your keep just like the rest of the paniolos.” His nostrils flared as he sniffed the air. “You smell just like a half-breed anyway; you might as well be one of them.”

He strode across to the pile of rubble, and I stared after him as he pulled a box of matches from his pocket “Watch this, Monkey,” he called, striking a match and setting light to the rubble. “That’s all your fuckin’ pansy paintings going up in smoke.”

He jumped back as the oil paints and the turps exploded in a sudden whoosh of flames. I watched numbly as my memories went up in a pall of noxious blue smoke. They were my images of the times I had felt happy on Kalani. Jack was burning Maluhia and
Kahanu and Fido; he was burning the fish freshly caught from the crystal ocean, the paniolos sitting around their fires, the numb-eyed cattle as they were seared by the branding iron. He was burning the red cardinal and the green lizards and the dappled pony on which I first rode proudly around the paddock.

Jack Kane was burning my life, and I launched myself at him like a hot-branded steer exploding from the pen. “I’ll kill you, you bastard,” I heard myself screaming. “I’ll kill you.”

My speed took him by surprise. I had him on his back. My hands were on his throat as he rolled over, kicking out at me. I had learned the martial arts from the Chinese cook, and I knew how to kill a man. I raised my rigid hand and brought it sideways across his windpipe. He gagged, unable even to scream, searching desperately for breath.

“I’ll kill you,” I said, and even as I said it, I realized I was enjoying myself. The thought of killing him was so pleasurable that it shocked me back to my senses. I was frightened by the depths of my hatred and by the power of my anger.

I straddled his chest, staring down at his purple face. And then I glanced up and saw Maluhia standing at the edge of the yard, watching us. Her hands flew to her face in horror as our eyes met, and I knew I could not do it. If I killed Jack Kane, I would be a murderer. And he was not worth it.

I climbed off him and waited as he struggled to regain his breath. After a while he sat up, rubbing his throat. He stared malevolently at me through bruised, puffy eyes.

“You’re soft in the brain all right,” he called hoarsely after me as I turned and strode away. “A mental retard like your fuckin’ mother. Nobody wants to know you. Nobody cares if you live or die.” He clambered to his feet and stood arrogantly with
his hands on his hips. “Coward,” he yelled mockingly. “Afraid to finish the job?”

I stopped in my tracks, my fists balled in readiness. For a moment he almost had me, just as in the old days. But this time I ignored his taunt and stalked back to the corral, climbed on my horse bareback, and galloped away.

I rode to the northeastern tip of the island, pushing the horse to go faster, all the way to the very edge where the cliff fell two hundred sheer feet, into the rocky Pacific.

The horse dug in its hooves, whinnying with fear. I leaped off and gazed down at the powerful ocean hurling itself in a solid wall over the jagged rocks, then dissolving into a curtain of foam and spray, surging and roiling, sucking bits of driftwood and flotsam into its infinite depths. I was beyond caring. I told myself there was nothing to live for, that anything, even the nothingness of death, was better than this.

I stood for a long time, until the sun began to set and I finally lifted my eyes from the rocks and the boiling sea and looked at the beauty around me, illuminated in a golden red glow. And I sank to my knees and howled like an animal. For the first time since I was seven years old I was crying.

   I slept under the stars that night, on my windy clifftop, communing with myself, asking myself what I would do next There was only one answer: I had to leave Kalani. But how? Kahanu was in charge of the motor launch—the only boat big enough to safely make the crossing to Maui. I could not ask him to help me because Archer would surely find out, and then Kahanu would lose his job. And I knew Archer’s vengeance was such he would make sure Kahanu never got employment again on the islands. The supply boats made their way to Kalani once a
month, and occasionally a cattle barge came to transport the animals to the ranch on the Big Island, but the crews were in Archer’s pay, and they would no more think of helping me escape than they would of cutting their own throats.

The only answer was Jack’s little outboard motorboat It was small, a mere seven feet in length with a shallow centerboard. It was meant for put-putting in the shallows and for fishing, not for crossing the twenty miles of treacherous channel between Kalani and Maui. The channel had notorious currents, and the winds could blow up the weather in less than an hour, bringing fierce squalls and thunderstorms. It was a risk, but one I knew I would have to take.

I lay on my back, watching the passage of the stars across the tropical night sky. Venus glittered as brightly as a diamond and looked so close I felt I could reach out and grab it. And as shooting stars catapulted across the heavens like celebratory fireworks, I planned my escape and wondered what I would do with my new freedom.

I rode back slowly before dawn, looking for the last time at the landscape I knew so well. The long grass was pearled with dew, the birds were beginning their morning chorus, and my country boy’s alert ears heard the rustle of a thousand small creatures. I loved Kalani and knew its beauty, like the knowledge of its evil heart, would always be part of me.

I planned to steal cans of fuel from the storeroom and stash them in the undergrowth behind the dock. Jack’s boat was beached nearby, and it would be easy under cover of darkness to load on the fuel and some food and glide silently out into the darkness, letting the current take the boat until I was far enough away to start the little motor. After that, steering by the stars, I would have to put my trust in my own skills and in God.