The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (37 page)

Jack was arrogant with Kahanu, but secretly he was afraid of him. Archer said Kahanu was the best man on the island; he was clever and a good worker, and he was brilliant with the Thoroughbred horses. Kahanu was valuable, and therefore, Jack did not have power over him, and Kahanu knew it. The Hawaiian ignored him and went about his work, whistling carelessly, while Jack hung around, hoping he would ask him to help, and when he did not, he would ride angrily off in search of another prey. Usually me.

He was twelve when he came home again for the school vacation, and I was eight. We eyed each other warily, and I saw his eyes widen as he looked me up and down. I was no longer the small, wizened little Monkey. I had shot up five inches, and my thin arms and legs were filling out with new muscles. But he had grown, too; he was always a good athlete, and
now his body had bulked out. He was becoming a man, and he was ready to follow in his father’s masculine footsteps.

Jack had always treated Maluhia with the scorn he felt she deserved. But now he began to look differently at her.

Whenever Archer was home, Maluhia served at the dinner table. She put on a colorful sarong and fastened her black hair into a fat, glossy braid, and she walked barefoot so as to make no noise as she carried the dishes of rice and pork and shrimp to the table and offered them to her master.

That first night they came home, Archer and Jack were seated at the table and Maluhia was serving them, as usual. I, of course, was supposed to take my food in the kitchen, but mostly I ate with Kahanu and the paniolos in the stables. I lay on my stomach in the jungly garden, hidden from sight, watching the quick green lizards dart up and down the wall and keeping a wary eye on Jack and his father at the dining table on the lanai. Ours was a war of surprise attacks, and I needed to know where Jack was at all times so I could prepare my defenses. Only this time I was not the one on Jack’s mind.

I watched Maluhia serve Archer and then offer the dish to Jack, bending forward politely. Jack glanced at her and then said something to his father that I didn’t catch, but they both laughed coarsely. And then Jack reached suddenly forward and put his hands on Maluhia’s breasts.

She leaped back, dropping the dish, clutching her sarong to her breasts as she stepped quickly away from him. Jack said something to Archer, and they both roared with laughter. I saw Maluhia’s head droop in shame, and I wanted to run to defend her. But I was no match for the two of them.

In the days after that Jack became even bolder, slapping Maluhia’s behind as she walked by him and
cupping his hand slyly over her breasts. Maluhia said nothing, but I seethed helplessly with the shame and anger I knew she was feeling.

“Come here, let’s have a look at you, Monkey,” Archer called a few days later. I had been keeping out of their sight as much as I could, spending my days with Kahanu. I hoped they had forgotten me, but I was wrong. I walked reluctantly out of the stable toward them. Archer pushed back his Stetson and put his hands on his hips, assessing me like a prize steer.

“Well, damn me, if the Monkey isn’t growing up,” he finally said, astonished. “He’s bigger and stronger. Maybe there’s some Kane genes in there after all. How old are you now, boy?”

“I am eight years old, sir.”

“Eight, huh?” He glanced at Jack and said with a grin, “How many years does that leave us, Jack?” Then, laughing uproariously, he turned away. “Kahanu,” he yelled over his shoulder, “put this boy to work. If we have to put up with him for ten more years, he might as well earn his keep.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Archer.” Kahanu saluted respectfully.

I kept my distance from them, sticking close to Kahanu, riding the canyons looking for lost cattle. Sometimes we would take his little boat out fishing for grouper, and afterward we would bake the fish over a driftwood fire, miles away from that evil lodge. So it wasn’t until Archer had left for Honolulu and Jack was at loose ends that he came looking for me.

“Hey, Monkey,” he called, striding toward me and slapping me on the shoulder. “Why don’t you and I go fishing?”

“I have work to do,” I replied, stiff with fright despite myself.

“Aw, come on, Monkey,” he said cajolingly. “Let’s
forget our differences. You’re older now, and stronger. We’re more like equals now, I’d say.”

I looked into his smiling face, and warning signals flickered up my spine. I did not trust him.

“I’m busy,” I replied curtly, turning away.

“Come on, Monkey.” He followed me, throwing a friendly arm across my shoulders. I froze and turned my head to look to him. The only other times Jack had ever touched me was to punch me or kick me. “Come on, fella,” he said tauntingly. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid.”

I never learned. I rose to his taunt, just as he knew I would. My expeditions with Kahanu had taught me how to handle a boat.

“Okay,” I agreed cockily.

I followed Jack along the sun-bleached wooden jetty, and we climbed into his little boat. He untied the painter and jerked the outboard into action, and we chugged off, heading to a place where he said he knew shoals of grouper were to be found. It seemed a long way to me, and after a while Jack’s jolly, bantering tone dissolved into silence.

After about half an hour I was becoming uneasy. “Why do we have to go this far to find grouper?” I asked him. “There’s plenty to be found right off Keeper’s Point.”

“These are better,” he said curtly, shading his eyes with his hand and staring at the small island we were approaching.

I stared at it with interest. It was the only other place I had seen since I came to Kalani more than three years before. Archer had made sure I never left the island, and I didn’t even know what a town or a school was. I was as ignorant of the world and its ways and of culture and education as I had been when I was five years old. I was excited to see this new place, and when the little boat crunched onto
the sand, I leaped out and pulled it into the shallows while Jack held the anchor ready.

I waded confidently onto the shore and turned to look for him. He was in the water, pushing the little boat back out to sea. I ran after him, but he jumped quickly into the boat and bent down, frantically jerking the outboard motor. It growled into life, and I stood chest-deep in the water, watching as the boat sped away from me. Good swimmer though I was, I knew I could never catch it.

Jack was standing in the center of the boat. I saw him punch his fist triumphantly in the air and heard him laughing. “Now let’s see how much you’ve learned, Monkey,” he yelled as he sped away, leaving me alone on the deserted island.

He would come back, I told myself confidently. He couldn’t just leave me there. Alone.

I looked at the dense mangroves behind me and sniffed their fetid, swampy smell. They looked dark and dangerous, and I walked quickly away down the beach, searching for shade. A stunted bush was all I found, and I crouched in its meager shadow, waiting.

Hours passed. I watched the sun dip lower in the sky until finally the glowing red ball touched the horizon, and then, with tropical suddenness, it was gone, leaving an otherworldly greenish afterglow. It was then I knew for certain Jack was not coming back to get me. I was alone on a deserted island, and I was afraid.

I had thought I would die of the heat, but now I was cold. And thirsty. There was no water anywhere near the beach, and I had not dared roam farther away in case Jack returned and I missed him. I paced around in the half-light but found nothing. I crouched on my rock again, clasping my arms around my hunched knees, staring vainly out to sea. The greenish afterglow slid gently into midnight
blue and then almost imperceptibly into darkness. There was no moon. It was just black.

I told myself it would be all right. Jack would return in the morning. Maluhia would miss me, and Kahanu. But morning was a long way off, and from the blackness behind me I heard fearsome rustling sounds, like animals on the prowl. I imagined alligators crawling toward me, ready to rip me limb from limb and crunch me up. In my head I heard tigers and lions breathing close to me and the hissing of snakes ready to strike. In the blackness, I thought I saw scorpions and giant toads and venomous spiders. My new courage disappeared beneath a thousand imaginary fears as I huddled on the cold beach, waiting for Jack to return and get me.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when the fearful night ended, planning how, when Jack arrived, I would swagger toward him, pretending I didn’t care about spending a night alone on a deserted island. I would tell him of the fruit I had found to eat, and the crystal spring of water behind the mangroves, and how I had seen a twenty-foot alligator back there and not been the least bit scared. I would pretend I was a regular little Robinson Crusoe, whose story I knew because it had been one of Nanny’s favorite books.

The sun lifted higher in the sky, and still Jack did not come. I was dying from hunger and thirst and was finally forced to search around for a stream or fruit, all the things I had planned so confidently to tell Jack I had done. But I was no Robinson Crusoe, and there was no fresh water, only the brackish, evilsmelling swamp, and no fresh fruits hanging conveniently from a tree.

I finally found a coconut washed up by the tide into a rock pool, and I pounced thankfully on it. Then I realized I had no machete to open it. I smashed it onto the rocks, again and again. I could
almost taste its cool juices trickling down my parched throat. But when it finally cracked, most of the milk spilled out before I could catch it. Sobbing with fear and frustration, I licked up what was left of the precious juices.

I sought the shade of the scrubby little bush again and sat somberly watching the sun’s burning passage through the sky. Every now and again I dipped into the ocean to cool myself, but the salt water crusted on my skin as it dried, and the sun burned me even more.

As the sun began to set again, I stumbled along the beach, dizzy from the heat and weak from hunger and dehydration. Surely Jack would come now, before darkness. But when the green afterglow filled the sky again and then turned gradually to midnight blue, I realized that he was not coming. Jack was never coming back. He had left me here to die.

I knew that by now he must have made up some story about my falling overboard and how he hadn’t noticed until it was too late. “Poor Monkey’s drowned,” I imagined him saying with a triumphant gleam in his eyes and a mock-sorrowful look on his face.

I lay spread-eagled on the beach, too weak to care anymore about alligators and snakes and lions. I closed my eyes, and a feeling of tranquillity came over me. It would be so easy just to fall asleep and, as Maluhia would have said, “let the Lord take me.”

I was unconscious when Kahanu arrived with the dawn and carried me tenderly back to his boat. Back in Kalani, Maluhia bathed my sun-blistered flesh with cold cloths and made potions from aromatic leaves to bring down my raging fever.

“The Yellow-haired One is the true son of the father,” Kahanu said ominously. “Evil passes from one generation to another….”

Later Maluhia told me that when she had told
Kahanu I was missing, he had gone straight to Jack and asked him where I was. Jack had denied ever seeing me, so they had searched the island.

“He must have fallen off the cliff and drowned,” Jack said casually, but Kahanu knew by then he was lying, and he exploded with anger. I had been gone a long time. He knew they were talking life and death now.

He grabbed Jack’s arm and twisted it behind his back. “Where is he, you little yellow-haired bastard?” he demanded, and Jack screamed and said he would tell his father, that Kahanu would be whipped, he would lose his job and be sent from the island.

Kahanu inched his arm up even farther, and Jack screamed louder. Then Maluhia whispered in Kahanu’s ear the secret reason Archer wanted me alive. “If the Monkey dies,” Kahanu said softly to Jack, “it is you who will get the whipping. Mr. Archer will whip you until you are dead, too, and you know it.”

Jack sobbed into the silence, but he knew that Kahanu was right. Archer would kill him if he had ruined their chance of getting at my fortune. So he told them where I was; he said I had leaped off the boat and swum to the island and refused to come back. He said I had told him I never wanted to see Kalani again, I would manage on my own….

“Evil, lying little bastard,” Kahanu snarled, jerking Jack’s arm upward until it snapped with a sound like a pistol shot. He screamed in agony. “Murderer,” Kahanu whispered in his ear. “You fell from a tree and broke your arm. Remember? Just the way the Monkey never left Kalani.”

Despite his pain, Jack recognized that a deal had been made and that Kahanu would not tell his father. He nodded his acceptance. The next day he was taken by boat to the doctor in Maui to get his
broken arm set. He then returned to Honolulu for the rest of his vacation, before going back to school.

I had won, and Kalani was mine again. For the time being.

   The years drifted slowly past, and I was happy in a fashion, though my restless dreams were still filled with images of the villa. I longed to see Nanny Beale again, to smell the mimosa blossoms in springtime and hear the songbirds in their silver aviary. But Kalani was my reality.

Every now and then Archer would send a lazy, half-baked “tutor” over to the island, to keep up the pretense to his social friends that he was doing the right thing, and poor Johnny was being educated, despite being “soft in the head.” Somehow they managed to teach me to read, and I devoured all the books in the house, even those whose pages were half eaten by termites. One of the tutors, a gaunt young English alcoholic, brought watercolors and oil paints and an easel. Whiskey was his tipple, but when that was not available, rum made a good enough substitute, or beer or wine or, in extremity, turpentine or rubbing alcohol.

He was usually too hung-over to do much teaching, but when his hand was steady enough, he painted well. I would stand on the rocks next to him, watching him magically re-create the seascape and the great swoop of the cliff, and my own hand itched to emulate him.