"Nevada means snowy," I said. "In Spanish."
They looked at me sadly, as though they had just noticed there was something wrong with me.
Peewee said, "I read somewhere about a guy who had frostbite. Gangrene set in. Toes turned black. He had to snip off his own toes with scissors."
"I never see snow," Tran said. He still had the newcomer's manner of saying everything like a sigh, and for that reason no one paid any attention to him.
"I feel like I'm turning into a snowman," Buddy said.
He spoke with such certainty and self-pity that he made himself seem like a big, bulky, immobile zombie, simple and bloodless.
"Me too, sometimes," Willis said, to please him. "Yeah," Peewee said, looking fearfully at Buddy's frosty eyes. I thought, These men will do anything for Buddy. The temperature was ninety-two in the shade and they were complaining of the cold.
I said, "Eskimos prefer the cold and ice to a thaw. Their lives are designed for snow. They hate getting wet. They hate warm weather."
"You wonder how they take a bath," Peewee said.
"They bathe in their own pee, the Greenland Eskimos," Sandford said. "That's a fact."
"That's disgusting," Willie said.
"Depends on whose pee," Buddy said. It was like a sign of health for him to attempt a joke.
Keola, sweeping the floor of Paradise Lost, said, "They say Eskimos same like Whyans. Except they stay up in Alaska. Eh, but Whyans not American Indians. Whyans not Native Americans. We da kine — "
"That's bullshit," Buddy said.
"We kanaka maoli," Keola said. "It so frikken hot I no can splain it." He kept sweeping, sweeping his way out of the bar. His mention of the
heat confirmed, as if we needed confirmation, that it was indeed stifling, yet Buddy sneered as if to show that Keola had blasphemed.
"Sometimes you don't feel your hands or feet," Peewee said.
Buddy said, "That's right," as though he were experiencing the phenomenon at that very moment.
"Was this guy," Peewee said, "in one of these freezing cold places with two dogs. He was starving. He wanted to eat one of the dogs, but he had no knife. The dogs — that's all he had. So what you think he done?"
Buddy said, "I know how he feels."
"He took a shit and made the shit into a knife shape, and when it froze rock hard he used it to cut one dog's throat. He skin the dog and eat the meat. Then he make the dog's bones into a sled and strip the skin into belts and harness the second dog and get pull back to his camp."
Breathing hard in the heat, we stared at Peewee.
"I read in a book," Peewee said.
"Never mind," Buddy said. "Whyans aren't Eskimos or anything like them. They need blankets at night in Wahiawa! They'd never make it in a cold place like the mainland."
"What about the snow on Mauna Kea?" Lemmo asked.
"Get plenty snow over there," Keola said.
"I've seen that snow. It's not real snow. It's Whyan snow."
Buddy had gone gray. His skin was paler, his lips blue, ashen at the edges, like the ghost of someone we used to know.
Even the absurd agreement, all the cold stories told in sympathy, did no good. But what worried me about the cold stories on this hot day was their absurdity. They did not matter, because Buddy was gone already, dead but still standing, and we were speaking to someone we had given up for lost, being kind to him out of superstition, because everyone on earth treated the dead with reverence, and we were no different.
No one contradicted him. You never contradict the dead, because the dead and dying — the condemned, like Buddy — know much more than you do.
71 Brudda Iz
What set him off was the remark "Whyans not Native Americans. We da kine — kanaka maoli." And a few days after that, the visit from the man known as Brudda Iz, a popular Hawaiian singer who sometimes traveled with a forklift, to hoist him onstage, because stairs were impossible for him. Brudda Iz was a kanaka maoli. He weighed six hundred and fifty pounds.
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole — his proper name — was a distant relation of Keola, his so-called calabash cousin. Iz happened to be on his way from a concert at the Waikiki Shell and stopped in, steadied by his entourage of locals in T-shirts and sunglasses, baggy shorts and rubber sandals. Seeing the vast brown man enter the lobby, propped on two canes, Rose stepped away, retreating in fear, but when Brudda Iz said in his soft, appealing way, "How you gonna hide from dis guy?" Rose smiled and went closer to the Hawaiian giant.
Keola was granted a kind of celebrity through this visit. He had mentioned his kinship with Brudda Iz, but no one believed him. And now they were together, the big brown man who walked like a cripple on ruined knees because of his size, Hawaii's bestknown singer, and his little cousin Keola.
They sat on the lanai — Iz on a stone bench; he didn't trust the chairs — and ordered loco mocos, a Hawaiian item that Buddy had put back on the menu under "House Specialties," for his own benefit after his lung surgery. Although Peewee had been making them in the staff canteen for years, Buddy took him aside and, in his new pedantic manner, described the perfect loco moco: "Pile up a mound of white rice in a bowl, lay a large medium-rare hamburger patty on top of the rice, slip a pair of fried eggs on top of the hamburger, with fried onions as garnish, and then, for want of a better word, ladle on enough brown gravy to cover the whole thing. Serve with soy sauce and ketchup."
Eyeing Brudda Iz, who ordered three of them, Buddy said, "He was nowhere until he got a howlie manager. Years ago I had some real big Whyan singers here at the hotel. I gave them their first break. This place was famous for their show, A Thousand Pounds of Melody."
"What happened to them?"
"We got closed down," he said. "But that was over another show, Tahitian Tita's Topless Hula."
He was so angry he didn't notice I was laughing. He raged over the visit from Brudda Iz, the sudden prominence and power of the janitor Keola, and that fact that he, the owner, was ignored.
"I knew the guy in Hilo that invented the loco moco," Buddy said. "They don't realize I go way back here."
I was only half listening. I couldn't take my eyes off Brudda Iz, who looked to me like a Polynesian monarch ("king of the cannibal isles," Buddy said when I mentioned it), sitting and eating, his big dimpled cheeks against his shoulders, his eyes squeezed deep into his face. People were reverential around him. They tiptoed, they sneaked looks, and when he uttered his high wheezy laugh, they stared.
Brudda Iz, too, had a tank of oxygen, because of his own overworked lungs. When Buddy was eyeing him, holding his mask against his face, they looked like a pair of astronauts, panting and suck-blowing at each other.
After Brudda Iz was gone and Keola returned to his mop, Buddy began to rant against Hawaiians, as though Iz and Keola stood for them all. His sick man's fear made him cynical and reckless.
They camped on the beach, Buddy said. They slept at the airport, they stole the avocados off your trees, they sat on your lawn and refused to go away until the police threatened them. And when at last they did go away, they left dirty diapers and platelunch wrappers behind. They were world-class litterers. Wherever there were Hawaiians, you saw billowing plastic bags, plastic cups, empty soda cans, and a trail of mashed Styrofoam.
I smiled hearing this from Buddy, because he had never been very tidy himself. But he was single-minded in this rant and as angry as any sick man can be. He had nothing else to do, and it was especially awful because he had nothing to lose in denouncing Hawaiians.
Sweetie said, "What's his beef?"