Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [40]
Alma followed Yolo’s gaze.
My father worshiped James Dean, she said. He wanted to be just like him.
What, said Yolo, without thinking: crazy and fucked up? Or gay?
The old Alma would have laughed.
Now she took a swig of her beer, opening another bottle as she drained the one she had.
He died like him, she said.
Yeah? said Yolo.
Ran his motorcycle over a cliff. Into the sea.
Really?
It’s his jacket I wear. The motorcycle I bought myself.
Do you like it very much?
Alma shrugged. It’s my ceremonial gear, she said. Like a tuxedo, where you come from. I wear it for all special occasions where it is important that my father’s influence is acknowledged. My mother died when I was three. She was Hawaiian.
Your father wasn’t? said Yolo in surprise.
German and Portuguese, she said. Other things too no doubt; you know how mixed-up Hawaiians are. But those two they claimed and tried to implement.
They were sitting on a wicker sofa on the lanai. Yolo lit another cigarette and threw the one he had been smoking into the ashtray, shaped like a mongoose, on the table in front of them. The mongoose had been brought to the islands to eat some pest or other, he seemed to recall from one of his tourist brochures, but the pest slept during the day and the mongoose at night. Or vice versa. So they’d become friends and waved briefly at one another in the late afternoon. Now the island was overrun with them and he’d heard they ate up people’s chickens.
They were like . . . overseers, really, said Alma. A separate class. They are the ones that got land without having to buy it, for instance, after Hawaiians like my mother’s people had their communal lands taken away from them and were placed on plantations to work. Along comes my dad, who’s given everything a young white boy could want. Clothes, money, cars, motorcycles. Except all he wants is to be James Dean. And after only one movie.
Yolo laughed.
That’s how slim the pickings were around here for a role model for someone like him. Hot-tempered, crazy, a European though born in the tropics. Whenever they traveled to the mainland dozens of people were sure to tell him how lucky he was. Just to be Hawaiian. Just to live in Hawaii. Paradise. Rebel Without a Cause? You bet.
With a sigh of exasperation, she rose to answer the phone, which had been ringing since they arrived. When she returned she was carrying two fresh beers and a plate of sashimi. On the floor near her feet there were already three empty bottles. His own bottle, though warm by now, was still half full. He took the cold bottle of Corona she offered and rubbed it across his forehead.
They wanted to send him “back East,” as they called it, to college. Never mind that he hated school and all its works. They figured that out there in the “back East” he’d find a woman like himself. And I’m sure there were many back there like him too.
Yolo smiled at the face Alma made.
Parents, he said.
Well, he wasn’t having it. First thing they knew he’d spotted a pure Hawaiian beauty over among the pineapples on Dole’s plantation and the second thing they knew he wanted to marry her. Olé! All hell broke loose. Alma snickered. But it was too late because I was already lying in wait, planning on being born.
What was the overdose of, do you think? asked Yolo, relinquishing his half-full bottle of beer and taking a sip of the fresh, cold one.
Ice, maybe, she said. Crystal methamphetamine. It’s the latest drug to swamp the island. So many of the young people are addicted to it. It fries the brain. Really, almost exactly the way an egg is fried. Marshall, my boy, hated being hooked. She took a fresh pack of Marlboros from a cabinet near the small wooden table in front of them. He started using on a dare, she said, tearing open a pack and lighting a fresh cigarette.
They were quiet, looking out at the ocean.
Where does it come from? Yolo asked. This is an island.
She looked at him coolly.