Blue Skin of the Sea by Graham Salisbury Page B

when he heard about the fight, especially since Mrs. Carvalho called him and asked that I stay out of school for three days. He took me out fishing with him, making me scrub the deck after every fish he caught. Keo just stayed home and shot at tin cans with the twenty-two. Jack had to stay away from school, too.
    Mrs. Lee seemed genuinely pleased to see me when I returned and even asked about my cat. I told her she’d gotten to like the dogs and that no mongoose would even think of bothering her with them around. She patted me on the back and told me to try to stay out of trouble.
    Jack now sat under the Tree of Webs alone. Only Mrs. Carvalho couldn’t see his mean streak. But the rest of us stayed away from him, watching him from the opposite corner of the school yard. He usually spent the entire recess throwing a pocketknife into the ground, trying to get it to land blade down.
    Around two weeks after the fight Mrs. Carvalho came into our classroom and asked Keo and me to please follow her outside. Everyone in the room watched us leave.
    When we got out on the wide veranda, she searched our eyes. “You are excused from school for two hours,” she said. Keo and I just stood there staring at her. Then she smiled and tipped her head toward the school yard. “Go with him.”
    Grampa Joe leaned up against the hood of his car with his arms crossed.
    “What’s going on?” Keo asked as we approached him.
    “Nothing,” he said. “I’m just taking you to lunch.”
    Keo and I looked at each other, then got into the car. Grampa Joe fired it up and drove us up the hill, to the highlands—to the high school.
    “We’re having lunch here,” he said. “You know Herman Fukuoka? The guy with the coffee trees next to my place? His wife runs the kitchen.”
    “But why eat here?” Keo asked.
    Grampa Joe tapped Keo’s shoulder and said, flicking his eyebrows, “Good food.”
    The cafeteria buzzed with students, many of whom we knew from last year at the elementary school. A couple of them waved and came over to eat with us. The lunchroom was loud. Everyone seemed excited, but the guys who sat with us said it was like that every day.
    I looked around to see how many white boys there were— only two. But no one was bothering them. They were just like everyone else.
    The whole time we were there Grampa Joe kept quiet, just ate his lunch and listened to us talk with our friends. When lunch was over, he drove us back down to the elementary school, talking about his coffee trees all the way.
    When we got out of the car, Keo said, “Why did you take us up to the high school for lunch?”
    “I told you, good food,” Grampa Joe said. “How’s the flea-bag cat?”
    “Fine,” I said.
    Grampa Joe nodded, then left.
    Walking back up to the classroom, I kept thinking about the two white boys at the high school. Then it suddenly struck me that Jack was white, too. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. The Black Widows weren’t
our
protection, they were his—Keo and all the other boys with dark skin and mixedblood. Jack Christensen was smart, all right. But I didn’t care very much what Jack thought. It was what Keo thought that mattered.
    After a while Jack, Keo, and I were talking again, but we never brought up the cat, or the Black Widows, or the fight. We didn’t even talk about high school. But Jack did confess that he had tied the mongoose to the flagpole.
    As the school year ended, Keo’s worry changed into boldness. He was going to the big school next year. You could see it in the way he walked and the way he started holding himself more erect, pushing out his chest. He went to work for Uncle Harley that summer, weighing and buying fish from the charter boats, and from the small commercial boats, like Dad’s, then selling them in Hilo.
    Jack met us on the pier late one afternoon, to say good-bye. He told us his parents were moving back to California. Keo and I were sitting in Dads Jeep, waiting for a ride