Hawaii - James Michener [555]
Kelly preferred Florsheim as a companion because the huge beach-boy could sing the strange falsetto of the islands, and together they made a gifted pair, for Kelly had a fine baritone voice. He was also skilled at slack-key, a system of guitar playing peculiar to Hawaii, in which the strings were specially tuned to produce both plucked melody and strummed chords. Many people thought of Kelly's slack-key as the voice of the islands, for when he was in good form he gave his music an urgent sweetness that no other possessed. The melodies were swift and tremulous like an island bird, but the chords were slow and sure like the thundering of the surf. When the beachboys had nothing to do, they often called, "Kelly blalah. Play da kine sleek-key like dat." He was their troubadour, but he rarely played for visitors. "I doan' like waste time haole," he growled. "Dey doan' know sleek-key."
The other pastime that he and Florsheim loved was sakura, a crazy Japanese card game played with little black cards that came in, a wooden box with a picture of cherry blossoms on the cover. Any beachboy was hailed as the day's hero who could scrape together enough money to buy a fresh box of sakura cards, and through the long hot days the gang would sit beneath coconut umbrellas, playing the silly game. No other was allowed, and if a man couldn't play sakura, he couldn't be a beachboy. Of course he must also speak degenerate pidgin, as on the afternoon when Kelly was protesting the price of cube steak at the comer drug store.
"Me t'ink high too much, da kine pipty cent," he mused.
"Kelly blalah, wha' da kine da kine you speak?" Florsheim asked idly.
"Whassamatta you, stoopid? You akamai good too much da kine da kine," Kelly growled, adding with a chopping motion of his right hand, "Da kine chop chop."
"Oh!" Florsheim sang in a high, descending wail of recognition. "You speak da fane da kine? Right, blalah, price too moch. Pipty cent too bloody takai." And they passed to other equally important topics.
As Kelly became better acquainted with American girls, he felt sorry for them. Invariably they confided how wretched their lives had been with their haole husbands, how the men were not interested in them and how unsatisfactory sex had been. This latter knowledge always astonished Kelly, for while the girls were with him they could think of little else, and if the world had women who were better at sex than the wahines who came over to Hawaii on the Moana Loa, he concluded they must be real tigers. One day he told Florsheim, "How some wahine gonna be any bettah than da kine wahine we get over heah? What you s'pose da mattah wid dese haole men?"
In 1947 he got a partial answer, because Florsheim married one of his young divorcees, a girl who had a lot of money and who gave him a Chevrolet convertible, and as long as they stayed in Hawaii things went rather well, but after three months in New York they broke all to hell, and Florsheim came back alone to resume his job on the beach. On a day when there was little doing he explained to his companions, "Dese wahine da kine, seem like dey two people. Over here on a surfboard dey relax, dey screw like mad, dey don't gi'e a damn. Ova' heah I t'row my wahine in da jalopy and we go okolehau." He steered the imaginary car with his hands. "We have bes' time."
"Wha' happen?" Kelly asked.
"I tell you, Kelly blalah," Florsheim drawled. "She take me New York, she no like da way I dress. She no like da kine talk, and she doan' like one goddam t'ing, I t'ink. Allatime give me hell. No more time to'go bed in de apternoon, when it's de bes'. So bimeby she tell me, 'Florsheim, you gotta go night school learn speak haole no kanaka,' and I tellem, 'Go to hell. I ketchem airplane Hawaii,' and she speak