Mystery Tribune / Issue Nº15

October in Kauai-1

Fiction

October in Kauaiby Sean Marciniak

Our plan to run away had imploded. All the money was gone, every last bitcoin.

“That was three thousand dollars’ worth,” Kayla said. “How does it just disappear?” We were both fifteen, and three thousand dollars had been a fortune to us.

“It’s complicated,” I lied. “It’s not so easy to explain.” Also untrue.

She closed her eyes, she shook her head. I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking of the hundreds of hours we’d logged at the supermarket, making birthday cakes for strangers.

I remember we were sitting on the roof of Kayla’s house, north of downtown Schenectady, under an October sky. The low valley splayed before us, a sea of rooflines penetrated by church spires and antennae, and the General Electric sign with its fourteen hundred light bulbs, scripting the company name atop the factory. It was after supper, the light fizzy, when neighbors settled in to watch their game shows and test their aptitudes. Kayla chewed the end of her dark hair.

“So you got hacked,” she said. Not a question. Her jaw flexed against her olive skin, her neck corded. She’d never trusted in digital currency but, in just a year, the value of bitcoin had doubled — and so had our savings.

I watched a light bulb flicker out in the GE sign. “We didn’t get hacked,” I said. “That had nothing to do with anything.”

“It was Francis then, wasn’t it?”

Francis was what we called my dad.

I nodded.

Since the department put him on leave, Francis had spare time to take an interest in my life. He learned about my job at Price Chopper, and took an old push-button calculator and guesstimated my earnings. It was only a matter of time after that. At the precinct they’d called him “the juicer.” His proficiency at interrogation, at squeezing confessions from the Schenectady locals, was the subject of local legend. It was part of the reason, too, he was on leave.

“Hey,” Kayla said.

I looked over.

“We’ll start over. I’ll open a Trustco account that he can’t touch.” She reached over and laid a hand on my forearm.

She leaned in and studied the marks, unafraid. Then pursed her lips and blew warmth across my skin, moving her chin back and forth.

I drew my elbow back and away. “Christ,” I said. Under my sweatshirt there were fresh, second-degree burns, new since the morning.

Kayla took a breath, then swept her hair up and tied it into a knot. “Let me see it,” she said, her black eyes still and resolved. I rolled up my sweatshirt, past the yellow and purple marbling of old bruises, and showed her. The four parallel burns were each an inch long, raised and glossy.

“Jesus,” she said. “What is this?”

“It’s nothing.”

She leaned in and studied the marks, unafraid. Then pursed her lips and blew warmth across my skin, moving her chin back and forth. The fine hairs on her forehead caught the last of the day’s light. I parted my mouth to say something.

Kayla looked up. “Tell me,” she said.

I shook my head — shook it of everything I couldn’t say.

He’d been cleaning his fingernails with the tine of a fork. Francis was always grooming himself. Combing hair with an old-school black comb, de-linting jackets with a shaving razor. Swallowing two rolls of breath mints a day. The house was a dump but Francis walked out of it each day in shoes polished to reflect the sky above, with a shaved jaw, with immaculate fingernails. Inside the home he looked like you’d expect. A caveman, hair at different pitches and yaws. Gritted canines. It was no different that morning. He asked me about the money, where it was, how much, his words tight, the fire danger high. So the truth came quick. Because, s**t no, I didn’t want him screwing a thumbnail under my jawline again. Or holding my head to the table and pressing a Q-tip deep into my ear canal.

After I finished talking, Francis broke from his manicure and regarded me. The skin around his eyes gathered itself, a new idea born.

“You should be ashamed,” he said. He stood, fork in hand, and crossed to the stove and turned one of the knobs below the General Electric insignia. His body shielded the stovetop, so I couldn’t see at the time that he’d pressed the fork to the coil. “I’ve had little gangbangers in the box,” he said, “not even out of middle school, who won’t talk no matter what you do to them. But you” — he checked the stovetop — “that was a lot of money you had. It’s okay with you, huh, that people can just take things from your pockets?”

Kayla didn’t need to know any of this. I rubbed the heel of my sneaker against the roof, loosening grit from the shingles.

“He spent it all on sss,” I told her.

She blinked. “What?”

“You can buy things on sss with bitcoin. We’re getting almost twenty packages tonight. He’ll sell them on the hill for half of what they’re worth.”

“Koshe,” she said. “I don’t care about that, okay? I care about your arm.” Her hand found its way around my shoulders. “Hey, look at me.”

I couldn’t. Our money had been for tickets — for me, for Kayla, and our best friend McNally. The plan? One-way flights to the tiny Hawaiian island of Kauai where, we’d read, there were secret tunnels on the old sugar plantations, leading to secret valleys. Hidden waterfalls and clandestine swimming pools. We were blessed with the idea that something was possible just because we could think it. But when I revisit what we believed, what motivated us, I don’t think it was stupid. Even still. We were seeking something we’d lost so early in our lives. That sense of wonder.

“Koshe, I’ll tell McNally, okay?”

I nodded. McNally was like my brother, and I was fed and watered at his house a couple times a week.

“You focus on Francis,” she said. “On getting him back. It’s time you did this.”

She was driving at something in particular. In August he’d come home with an iPhone and asked me to set it up. It wasn’t store-bought — it had to be jailbroken — and I found myself erasing photos and texts belonging to a kid who went to Schenectady High. In configuring the device for Francis, I built a backdoor into it, which meant there was a portfolio of deplorable things on the menu here. Planting stolen credit card numbers. Filling his camera roll with photos of adolescents. But at the end of the day, I could think up whatever I wanted. Even Kayla knew the cops wouldn’t arrest Francis. Evidence would vanish, leaving just me and him alone at a kitchen table.

Below our feet, beneath the asphalt shingles, Kayla’s mom yelled at her dad. It was a full-on holler, her mom’s voice husky, maybe a word or two away from tears. Her dad yelled back, so it went. Kayla put her head on my shoulder and began to sing. It was an Italian song she’d learned from her grandmother. I don’t recall the words or the melody, just her voice. Her low register, the static in her tone, as though filtered through an old radio grabbing signals from a distant land.

Kayla cleared her throat. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

◆

The walk to the railroad bridge took us through the neighborhoods and into the pine forest. The wind died at the tree line and it was only us, the steal of our footsteps over bedded needles, the scent of pitch.

She had something to tell me, she’d said.

My feet lost touch with the earth and I felt it — transcendence. Transcendence over the endless gray days we faced, the milky light from an estranged sun, a winter that lasted into May. None of that would affect us, we had each other. There’d be no need for Kauai.

We arrived at the abandoned railroad tracks and followed them to the bridge. It was an old iron warhorse of a bridge, built the same time as the Erie Canal, spanning a deep ravine. At the edge of the hollow, where the ironwork projected from the falling ground, we found the trapdoor and eased it open and climbed into the chamber below. Workers had used it to access the railroad trestles, but that was long ago. This was a forgotten place. Not even the seniors had found it. A hundred feet below in the belly of the ravine, they smoked dope and fondled each other.

I closed the top hatch while Kayla turned on her iPhone’s flashlight and lit the kerosene lamp.

The cast of the small fire danced across the walls. Kayla had etched drawings into the iron plates with a slotted screwdriver, her lines silver and shiny. She preferred the bold style of the graphic novel, but it wasn’t superheroes populating the walls. The protagonists were small figures dwarfed by big places. One man adrift in a rolling ocean. A young woman diving across the face of a mountain. Maybe that’s why she picked Kauai. It was part of an archipelago that had the audacity to stretch fifteen hundred miles across the Pacific Ocean. In a corner we kept rolled posters of the Na Pali coast.

In another corner we’d stowed sleeping bags, patched with duct tape. I shook them out. Kayla reached up to hang the kerosene lamp on a hook, and the waistband of her panties flashed from above her blue jeans. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, but I’d spent the whole summer riding my bike past her home.

I zipped together two sleeping bags and we pulled off our boots and fit ourselves in. Kayla smelled of scented soaps and lotions, an intoxicating confusion of lavender and cocoa butter. This was all something new. It’d started in July, when she’d traded in her boy T-shirts for halter tops. I think McNally and I both noticed, though it wasn’t something we spoke about. It wouldn’t have been okay if we both liked her.

“What did you want to tell me?” I said. It was all I could do not to squeak.

Her body tensed.

“So,” she said, and a giggle escaped her. Which was a strange thing, because Kayla wasn’t the sort who giggled.

“This just kind of happened,” she said, her eyes dancing. “I gave McNally a blowjob.”

She seemed giddy, like she was excited to tell me. Like this was something I wanted to hear.

And all I could think was, McNally? The hygiene issues aside, there were a thousand reasons it shouldn’t have been him. He was uncircumcised. The missing link between Sapian and Neanderthal, a kid with a loop of cartoon music playing in his head. What connection could she have with him? With his apple-pie family. A dad who favored talk of mortgages and airline points, a mom who fretted over the DNA test results of her pets.

I looked away, blinking back saltwater, wondering what signs I’d missed, wondering what would become of me. Kayla and McNally were my only friends, and they were evolving. Me? Not so much, apparently.

God knows what humiliations I would’ve suffered next if the trucks, growling and diesel-fueled, hadn’t rolled up overhead. An old road followed the railroad tracks, with no sanctioned access, and only two kinds of people drove this route at night: cops, and robbers. Kayla and I sat up together in the shared sleeping bag. She unzipped the bag, stood, and snuffed the kerosene lamp. I stood too and took her hand. In the dark we held our breath.

There were two vehicles, pressing the gravel flat. One engine died, then the other, then the tick of cooling engines. A door opened, followed by boots, crunching through the dirt and rocks, until the bridge clanged under the stranger’s weight and his soles came to rest on the trapdoor, feet from our heads.

There was only one other way out of our chamber. A small door led to the undercarriage of the bridge, a skeleton of iron girders that crossed and angled to the far side of the ravine. I wasn’t a Mensa candidate, but monkeying our way through the trestles in the dark, I knew, wasn’t a solid idea.

The man standing above us took a husky inhale — God, it sounded like his mouth was at our ears — and threw something into the ravine. There was a grunt as it left his hands, the whisper of rip-stop nylon under quick, violent friction. A few moments later we heard the sound of something breaking through canopy branches, then pinwheeling through piles of leaves and knocking across rocks.