Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

Or he told me I was adopted and that he’d give me back to the orphanage if I didn’t behave. I believed him.

The container we lived in for a while had no windows and was like an oven in the summer when the trade winds dropped.

I smoked cigarettes. Jen said smoking is a filthy habit and to give it up. No smoking or drinking on Niihau. But smoking relaxes you, and anyone who doesn’t know that has never smoked. I needed to be relaxed. I smoked pakalolo. It was easy to get; everyone grew it, and that too was relaxing. “Don’t knock it,” I’d said to Jen, who would have been mellower with Dad if she used just a skosh of weed, and I told her so.

“Just a skosh,” she said, wily old auntie, and, “Here, why you no help me bake some cookies?”

She had me sift the flour and mix in the sugar and shortening and butter, and when it was smooth, the cup of chocolate chips. She could tell that I was enjoying the mixing.

“Your ma wen never show you how for make cookies?” she asked, pretending to be amazed.

Which was cruel, because my real mother was dead from riding in the back of a pickup truck that was rear-ended on Kokee Road.

“Not yet,” Jen said, snatching the spoon I was going to lick.

And then she took me out to the yard and got a stick and poked it into a twist of dog doo, and back in the kitchen she dipped the stick into the golden cookie dough and stirred it.

“Now taste um.”

She knew what I’d say, so I didn’t say it.

“Just a skosh!” she screamed. “Same wid djrugs!”

But when he brought home the key of coke from that Moniz cousin my life was changed, and I don’t care what anyone says: it is the greatest feeling in the world, and not addictive like meth if you’re smart, no more than candy, in fact just like candy. I wanted to be a functioning coke sniffer.

“It’s spendy,” the chief used to say. But he found some more, maybe the same key, and he made me pay for it in my own way.

He couldn’t blame me for wanting more. Junior got some in Maui from his surfing buddy Ledward, and said, “Now what are you going to do for me?”

Erskine was always working, at the station or on calls. What was I supposed to do — and his boss the chief always hanging around?

“What you good at?” the chief asked.

“Nothing. I so junk.”

That made him laugh.

“The junkest.”

Having Kanoa didn’t make him happy either. The chief held him more than Erskine did at the baby luau.

Junior was always around on the day Erskine was in Hanalei. When he said, “I want to try something insane,” I knew I’d have to say yes, and met Ledward.

I knew Erskine wouldn’t shoot.

When we met on the Big Island, all Erskine talked about was how unreasonable his ex was — demanding, petty, immature — and I was totally on his side. He did not miss his little boy Kanoa at first, but after we were settled and he moved from highway patrol to a desk job in Hilo, he said he wanted to get custody, that his ex was a bad influence.

Around that time I was thinking: Cop, killjoy, straight arrow, spanker, scold — what kind of kid would want to be in the same house with him?

I could just about stand him. He was a righteous bully, never wrong, knew all the answers, knew the law (“that’s a Class-A felony”). I felt sorry for what he’d been through, but I didn’t want to go through it myself. He was making plans to fly over to Kauai to visit the kid.

I called Verna. I said, “You don’t know me.”

“Who’s this?” she asked.

“Noelani. But listen up. I just want you to know that Skinny is coming over to talk to you about joint custody.”

“That’s all I need.”

And I heard a man in the background squawking and thought, Another one.

After that, Erskine said, “Every time I go over there she’s not at home, the kid’s not there, and no one knows where they went.”

“Maybe at her parents’ place.”

Erskine said, “She doesn’t have anyone in the world except me,” and went silent.

That was more and more the case with me. My friends didn’t like Erskine for his strictness. They enjoyed a little smoke now and then, they watched football, they drank beer at the beach. And Erskine frowned at them the whole time.

“Dis guy nothing but stink-eye.”

He had no doubts. He was the law, and even on a neighbor island where things weren’t so strict he enforced the pettiest law: no dogs on the beach, no ball games, no open containers of alcohol — even confiscated pakalolo and brought it home and maybe was testing me because he made a big show of locking it in a desk drawer.

In the pictures he showed me, his kid looked so different and so poi-dog I wanted to say, “You sure he stay yours?”

Not only the kid’s different features but the kid’s smile — Erskine never smiled. Plus the fact that after the first few times, Erskine seemed to lose interest in me. I was a lot older than Verna — closer to Erskine’s age — but even so, I seemed to have more in common with her, this ex-wife, than the man himself.

And she began confiding in me, saying how she’d let him down.

“Don’t beat yourself up,” I said.

Though I rarely went to a neighbor island, I went over there to see what she was really like. She was young enough to be my daughter, and that’s how I felt toward her. She gave me a big hug, and we had coffee.

“Ma, I want do shee-shee!”

The kid Kanoa was just awful and looked local. But he was very well dressed, new shirt and slippers and surfer shorts. I felt sorry for Verna, but I didn’t want him. So I kept tipping her off whenever Erskine was on his way over. I thought I was doing everyone a favor.

On that one and only visit I met her new guy, Junior, and recognized him from what Erskine had told me: hapa-haole, tribal tattoos, Raiders hat on backward, a big laid-back moke who worked an excavator. But I could also see the attraction. He was like, “Whatever,” and that was not Erskine’s way.

What ended it was this visit. I began to think: She’s been through a lot, made a few bad choices and lost her looks living with this blalah, and was making the best of it. But time passed, and I lived with Erskine and got to know him better and became like her. He made me that way, and I knew exactly why she two-timed him.

If I stayed with Erskine that’s how I’d end up, as a stoner and probably cheating on him and getting blamed, and so I fired him and went back to my own island, Lanai, and stayed in touch with Verna.

The last thing Erskine said to me was “I’ll probably stay single. I’ll be okay. I can’t handle hooking up with a new wahine, telling her all my stories, listening to all her stories, and then there’s dealing with her stuffs. I’m married to my job.”

I put it down to Erskine was a haole from the mainland, raised by his mother, and didn’t always understand what he was looking at. Like the tourists who sit on the beach and don’t see those upside-down bowls in the shore-break are turtles feeding on the rocks and far out the puff of mist is a whale blowing, and when the tourists turn their backs the turtles stick their heads up and the whale breaches, slapping itself down sideways. Or they see monster surf and say, “Hey, cool.”

Such a know-it-all giving out speeding tickets is one thing. But when he busted me for possession, and I was still a kid: I couldn’t work for the state or join the army or get back to Maui. So I negotiated a key of coke from some dealers in Oahu, but it ended up in the harbor. Barry Moniz knew, and told his uncle, the chief, and that was the end of my hopes.