Just another tough day—Kavika, the owner of Jesus Is Lord Tree Service, usually jabbers like a deranged talk show host on the way home after work. But we’re coming past Papailoa Road and we can see Lani’s, and the waves are even bigger now. And he still hasn’t said anything. His bronze skin, like armour in the coconut afternoon light.
In Wailua, Kavika makes Grom and Mace drive the pickup truck and has me ride with him. Kavika loves being able to drive his own custom-built work truck. The plywood is rotting on the carcass of the old ‘81 F-350. Now, we can see the ocean and there’s barely any breath of wind. He says nothing. The work truck is creaking and groaning from the load of chipped coconut and mango tree branches in the bed. The North Shore is wearing that great coat of mist kicked up by the surf, a mist the sun has no chance of burning away.
The boss is wearing the same shirt as me: green, size Large with Jesus Is Lord in yellow letters across the front. His is faded. Mine isn’t. He’s chopped off the sleeves with a cane knife. Mine still has sleeves. His shirt is covered in dead ants and sweat, rat piss and shit.
I’m wearing Kavika’s boots, ones he ordered, but didn’t like that cost me two weeks' pay. My F-150 with no floor under the pedals was another two months of pay. Grampa sends me one hundred bucks a month so long as I stay enrolled in my classes at UH. Which is how I buy food.
The rats, the crap they bring up the trees. They drag fishing line, large cellophane chip bags, tiny Ziplock empty meth bags, Snickers bar wrappers. Rats and centipedes. That’s why I leave my sleeves on. Plus, the biting ants.
The cane knife goes through centipede dens, ant colonies, rat nests, and as you trim up the fronds and take off the fruit, all the bowels of those nests try to crawl down your shirt. Rats jump at your face. Centipedes sting exposed skin. Biting ants find a way down to latch on to your testicles. I’ve let out shrill screams and startled people because a biting ant found its way to my nads a day later and dug in halfway through dinner. Or on The Bus on the way to class.
But for once, I have no rat shit on my shirt. No ants are crawling up my work pants hell bent on biting my testes. For once, I’m not trimming rat piss coconut trees. No ants. No blue-veined centipedes. For once the boss, Kavika, not me, is spending the day climbing some celebrities’ coconuts -it’s the only time he still climbs- and has been soaking in rat shit dust and sweat since the start of work. Me and Grom have been pulling the cut and fallen branches of a mango tree out of a pit-like cement courtyard. Sweat and mango sap is way better than sweat and rat shit and biting ants. I think I’m lucky, but it turns out that I am allergic as hell to mango tree sap, but I don’t find that out until tomorrow.
Mango tree sap bleeds out of the tree, like craft glue from kindergarten, white and viscous all over me like a thick milk. The mango tree grows out of a courtyard among the apartments outside the old sugar mill. It’s all walled in. We have to chainsaw the tree down to pieces, each mango log, like a leg, or an arm, a piece of something whole bleeding thick milk. Then, we have to throw it over the wall of this courtyard before we can put it through the chipper.
Hard work. But better than the rat shit coconuts.
It’s the best and biggest day of surf in my first year on the North Shore. And I have to go to work for Kavika. Da Boss. Normally, he’d call it a surf day but he has to do those coconuts for the famous people, so he puts us to work too.
I start itching a little more after lunch; a precursor to what is coming.
Kavika’s bronze skin gives him protection. My skin is a map of boardshort rash, reef rash, road rash from skating, mosquito bites, ant bites, scar lines from Man ‘o Wars, scar lines from Third Dip not quite healed - the time when Johnny Boy called me into the one that sent me over, face first. Kavika reminds me often I’m lucky his friend is a plastic surgeon at the military hospital.
My skin is puffy and red. Staph infections crater along my shin and hip and foot. Pus seeps up the holes. I have an urchin spike I can’t knife out, I can feel it through my boot on every step. I am blessed Kavika doesn’t make me climb coconuts today. My skin is broken by the tropics and is itching, even before the mango sap.
The chipper rides out of line with the truck because Grom cuts the turn too tight after gassing up and catches the wheel on that upside-down U steel barrier they bookend the pumps with.
It bends the whole fucken’ axel.
Grom had to ride in the work truck that day with Kavika. He told me about it, and bending that axel was nothing compared to what just happened in Wailua. A Rage song starts playing in my head in that mile after the landing strip, before the break in the trees by Lani’s. I sing it a little, to calm my nerves, maybe. I sing in the passenger’s seat of the work truck that roars and squeaks.
“Something about silence makes me sick,” I say under my breath, not really meaning for him to hear it.
Or maybe I want him to hear it. He takes a deep and audible breath. He is waiting to see the ocean and how big it is at Himalayas and may have mumbled, “Cuz silence can be violent sorta like a slit wrist.” But I can’t be sure. The truck is so loud.
“If you had just rigged it the first time, the way I had showed you…” Kavika said.
“If the vibe was suicide,” I keep singing, “then you would push the button.”
Grom told me earlier he was thinking about throwing himself into the chipper to shred his human flesh up with the bleeding mango logs.
Kavika’s chipper is powered by a Chevy V8 small block engine. It’s an old chuck-and-duck with the blades whirring outside of anything, all exposed. As soon as the blades touch a log, it snaps through the chute lightning-fast and into the plywood catch of the work truck.
Grom told me he wanted to go through the chipper too. That it would be fast, and fuck Kavika. That is in the afternoon, as we are getting the rest of the branches out of that pit of a courtyard and firing them, snap, snap, snap, through the chipper.
It is at the removal of the big trunk that things get ugly. I have a smaller section of log rigged up to cut and lower, but as I sink my chainsaw into the backcut, Kavika pulls into the jobsite and gets out of his pickup. I can see his rat shit soaked, sleeveless work shirt from up on top of the tree.
“Don’t do it like that!” he shouts at me before he even closes his door. “Move that hitch down! Take twice that log! One cut!”
“No!” I shout back as loud as I can cuz Grom is running the chipper. “That’s too much weight. The rope is gonna stretch and we’re gonna hit that lady’s house.”
“Just do it how I tell you to do it!” he shouts. “I would have been done with this an hour ago.”
He always says things like that. Yesterday we had to trim four loaded coconut trees and after an hour he shouted up, “I woulda had that done in fifteen minutes!”
So, I untie my timber hitch, move it down to where Kavika said, near my feet. I start up the chainsaw again, make the back cut, then the front cut. I push the log off the trunk. The lowering rope stretches too far and thousand pounds of mango log act like a wrecking ball and bang into the roof of the old wood frame house about a foot to the left.
The house settles back into place. But ten seconds later, the little Japanese lady who lives there runs out. She is screaming.
“But if you’re bowing down, then let me do the cutting.” I say that line a little louder to make sure he heard.
Another big exhale from the boss, and then he says, “I’m gonna have to take the damage for the house outta your pay.”
I don’t wait, not even a beat. “Fuck you Kavika, I quit,” I say.
Kavika slams his foot down on the brakes as we are passing Holton’s, but the brakes are so mangled we don’t screech to a halt till we are nearly past Jocko’s. Kavika slams the stem into park, opens the door—he has to thumb the button on the outside handle to release the latch- and, as he walks around the front of the work truck, he rips his old work shirt off like they do in pro wrestling. His Hawaiian tan skin is scarred but bronze and tough, like that of a man.
He is flexing his muscles on the side of the road in front of the truck and he screams, “Nobody quits!” while looking at me dead in the eyes through the dirty windshield. I take a deep breath. I open the door – I have to thumb the button on the outside handle to release the latch- and grab two cane knives off the dashboard as I step out into the sunny, salt spray mist, and face Kavika.
A cane knife is a serious blade. Kavika searches the garage sales down in Eva for the last of the out-of-production Cobras. Same length as the ones you can get at Haleiwa Hardware, but twice as wide. Superior steel. Japanese. We sharpen them three or four times a day. They are the best knife in the world for trimming coconut trees. We keep them in the dash of the old Ford work truck and we treat them with the reverence of something extinct. Each sharpen takes a little more metal off, and eventually all the Cobras will be gone.
Kavika screams again, “Nobody quits!” But with a razor-sharp Cobra in each hand I feel safe. Nobody in their right mind would attack a man, or even a rashed up, puffy-skinned teenage boy like me, if they are holding two of these brutal knives.
I close the door. I am, by then, able to put one of these knives through the base of three palm fronds at once. I can trim a loaded coconut tree - pretty as can be - with a Cobra cane knife, just as easily as you peel a carrot. I can chop a rat in half before it lands on my face. I go home covered in rat blood sometimes, mixed in with the sweat and rat shit.
I could slice him in half too. Kavika looks at the knives,and looks back at me. He charges. Of course he charges. Today was a tough day on the North Shore. The waves were huge. And I already had hard decisions to make.
Today, I woke up at dawn in my shitty little room on the bottom floor of the house behind Lopez’s house. This was before they cut down that big banyan tree. It was before Jamie O’Brien grew up, got famous, bought the place and fixed it up. This was when you could rent a shitty little roach infested room for two hundred bucks a month. Sure, it might flood whenever it rained or whenever a big swell hit, and you might have turds floating down the hallway. Sure there were rats in the walls and roaches in the utensil drawer. But it was at Pipeline.
So, like I did every morning before work or before I caught The Bus down to UH, I climbed up that banyan tree to check the surf. Pipe was way too big so I grabbed my 8’6, threw it in my truck that cost me two months of coconut tree trimming, and drove the mile down to Sunset with Grom, where we paddled out. Everybody knew it was going to be big. The Hawaiian Grapevine worked well before the internet, but nobody knew the numbers. Nobody knew just how big it was going to get.
We paddled out and it was ten foot, but by the time we got out it was twenty foot plus and out of control. We kept paddling. Grom spun on one, “Fuck this!” he said. “I’ll see ya at work,” and he caught the last rideable wave back to safety.
Now, I was alone, and so far out that I could no longer see the beach. Just the satellite up on the hill poking out from the sea mist.
This happened to Dicky Cross in the fifties. He got stuck outside at Sunset on a rising swell and died trying to paddle down to Waimea.
I started to panic at the thought of navigating the outer reefs on the way down there. What about Third Reef Pipe? I threw up a little bit. What about Outer Logs? I threw up a bit more. I decided that I would not do a Dicky Cross. I decided to put my head down and paddle for the satellite dish, aim the front of my board at Backyards, and charge. I paddled as hard as I could straight in until a wave finally broke outside, caught me inside, and rag-dolled me in. I was lucky. I hit the reef at Val’s and scrambled onto the sand before the rip could drag me back out.
I was panting on the sand with Grom standing over me. “Yea, I kissed the sand too,” he said. “That was heavy. C’mon, we’re late for work.”
Now I'm feeling tough standing there on the side of the road with the knives in hand. I could cleave any man into bleeding pieces with these knives. Nobody is tough enough to charge at me while I’m holding these knives. Each one he searched for at all those garage sales. Each one he held in a sort of reverence. He’d sell his trucks and he’d sell his boots, but he’d never sell a Cobra knife.
Kavika takes one look at his two knives, and charges straight at me.
I have time - as you do in the moments before you are about to fight to the death with a mad Hawaiian - to think. The world slows down. I have time to think about the blood that I will be covered with, about how I will weakly claim self-defense to the unsympathetic Hawaiian cop who will show up and arrest me. I have time, in the moment before Kavika can reach me, to think about how tough I really am.
Am I tough enough to kill a man?
Am I tough enough with my puffed up, mango-rashed, itchy, haole skin to handle the jail time? Will I be in for murder or just manslaughter? The green shirt is covered in rat shit crust. The black Dickies. The work boots, like mine, with the steel toe and the steel reinforced inlay, are good for wearing the gaffs you need to spike up the coconut trees. The bronzed skin is nearly upon me. And just like this morning, when I was caught outside at Sunset, I had to act. I have to charge. I have to be tough; or, I have to die.
And right before Kavika’s fists reach me, I drop the two knives. I hear them clang on Kam Highway. And, like I did this morning when I finally got inside the lineup at Sunset far enough for a wave to break outside of me, for the second time today, I prepared myself for death.
As the knives clang, I can see Kavika’s fists open up. I can see he decides not to kill me. Not because I am a scared teenaged kid with puffy red skin and not quite healed reef scars on my face, but because he knows they found Todd Chesser’s body at lunchtime.
Cheese had paddled out to Alligators around the same time I paddled out at Sunset. Alligators is the big outer left just on the downside from Waimea, right in front of Kavika’s house. Cheese drowned earlier that morning when a massive set caught him.
Kavika grabs me by my shirt, the green shirt soaked with sweat and mango tree sap and has Jesus is Lord printed in big, yellow letters on the front and back. He lifts me up and chucks me against the rock wall in front of Jocko’s, the one covered with Morning Glory. He comes up close to me.
“Chesser died today,” he says, “and that’s enough death for one day.”
Kavika walks over to the knives, picks them up, and looks them over for any damage to the blades.
“If you nicked my blade, I would have to kill you,” he says. He places them back carefully, sharp side in, on the dash. “Now get back in the fucken’ truck.”
I’m still whimpering a little as I climb back onto the spring-worn passenger seat. Kavika takes a deep breath, pulls the stem into drive.
“Nobody fucken’ quits,” he says, and pulls into the Kam Highway traffic and into the sea mist that cloaks the North Shore.
