Short Stories -- Christmas Day 2004

It was Christmas Day, and we’d been on the beach since 5 a.m., first with flashlights stumbling along the cold sand and watching, entranced, as the ivory pockmarked moon sank towards the black sea just before the sun came out, then later, getting in a ten kilometer run to rival the marines, and later still, after breakfast, getting sunburned and sweaty, playing volleyball and swimming and snorkeling all without a break. About the only thing we hadn’t done was dive off the black rock promontory and that was because we both knew it would be a stupid thing to do, considering the beers we’d had at noon.

Soon enough, anyway, one of the long-haired hotel employees wearing a loincloth like Tarzan would emerge to the sound of drums and after running around the resort with a flaming torch to light the pathway torches and enchant the ladies, he would climb to the top of the rock, pause dramatically, place his torch into the holder there and then dive into the sea. It was at least a twenty five foot dive and I had to hand it to these guys, they did it without flinching, night after night to the awestruck applause of the folks standing about the beach or lawn of the Sheraton Maui. If this is what the Hawaiians used to do, good for them, but it must be a hell of a shock for the fish below, I remember thinking.

Nope, for me, at least, I was past my Tarzan days and 5 p.m. seemed like a good time to just be sitting quietly in the open air bar, watching the lithesome girls cavort in the swimming pool that curved around our shady oasis, and ordering some sort of dinner that didn’t involve cranberries.

You see, I thought we’d gotten safely past that when I’d maneuvered Jed into the bar and satisfied myself that the guy cooking steaks knew what he was about. But my luck didn’t hold. “What’s wrong with you two?” the black bartender asked in mock frustration, when we signaled him for another round of Heineken and asked the waitress who delivered it to swivel the T.V. so we could watch the rest of the Lakers game. “Why aren’t you in the hotel restaurant enjoying the big Christmas buffet? Why are you sitting here?”

Well, that got to Jed, alright. “If we wanted turkey dinner, do you really think we’d be here in your lousy bar listening to Tommy-Can’t-Sing doing his pitiful rendition of the Eagles?” he burst out. He abruptly turned his back on me, the bartender and the game, and stared out over the water. The bartender mopped the bar with a cloth and raised his eyebrows at me. I eased off my seat and went to the bar as if to check the tab, laying my hand protectively over the container of bar nuts that was to be our dinner that night if the steaks didn’t work out and Jed stormed off back to our room.

“Don’t bug him, okay? It was supposed to be his wedding night tonight but she called the thing off two weeks ago and took off with his best man. A package deal—well, the hotel, I mean, and he couldn’t get a refund. So now he’s stuck with his best friend from high school who is just trying to keep him alive till the morning. I need all the help I can get….”

The bartender scratched his head and, without asking, plunked another container of bar nuts on the bar in front of me. “I ain’t exactly heard that one before. You, sir, are a true friend. What can I do to help? You want that I should rustle up some gals to go dancing or--”

I shook my head. “Definitely no gals, that would just set him off again. It’s hard enough with these ones in the pool, but I told him to keep his eyes straight out to sea. I figure some billiards and brandy and cigars after his steak and with all the exercise he’s had today, he’ll be safely asleep by 9 o’clock. Last time he was here he was pretty enthusiastic about playing snooker with some Australians in the bar, but I don’t know where that was.”

The bartender waggled his lower lip with his finger. “Let’s see, we did have two snooker tables at one time in the main bar, but most Americans prefer pool and the tables didn’t get used much so they moved them off to one of the private dining rooms to make more room for dancing. They still use them for private functions sometimes. I get off at 8 p.m. and the manager on duty tonight is a friend of mine, you want me to see what I can do?”

“That would be swell,” I said, extending a hand. “I’m Rick, by the way.”

The bartender shook my hand. “I’m Paul.”

“Well, Paul, you do stand for the best in bartending let me tell you…. But, don’t you have a family dinner to get to, yourself?”

“Nah, divorced, no family except a sister in Detroit, that’s why they’ve got me in here on Christmas day. We’ll fix your feller up, don’t worry. Now, did you happen to get cigars?”

I felt my face redden. “No, darn it, I was going to stop in at the Cannery Mall yesterday afternoon and try out Sir Wilfred’s – I heard they had a humidor and pretty good cigars.”

“That’s okay, because Lamont’s –that’s the gift shop here—has some of Sir Wilfred’s Big Kahuna cigars – you can get individual ones or a five pack. But they close tonight at 8. If you like I can get one of the hotel staff to charge a pack to your room and bring it over to the bar for you.”

“Now that’s service! Yes, please arrange it for us. Room 4206, Rick Webber. Do you have a chit I can sign?”

“Sign right here, my man.”

“Thanks.”

“Anything else I can do for you Rick?”

Emboldened, I said: “There is one thing. Maybe you could let your singer off early to get to his family dinner.”

Paul grinned at me, but didn’t say anything. I put a fifty dollar bill on the counter, but he shook his head. “Don’t waste your money. He’s off in fifteen minutes anyway. We’ve got canned music after that. You have something in mind?”

“Hawaii-five-oh theme song, maybe?”

“And I thought I was going to get through 2004 without a request for that. Rick, you’ve just ruined my night. Oh, man, you’re bad! A few stanzas of that and we’ll be hearing “Book ‘im Denn-o” all night. But, gosh (and here he took another few swipes at the counter with his cloth as if that would help him decide the matter) if you think it will cheer up your friend, I’ll play it.”

I tucked the fifty into Paul’s breast pocket as a thank you and went back to our table. I lifted my beer in a toast. “Okay, Jed, here’s to best buds, best spuds.”

Jed looked at me a long moment, then laughed. “I should have stayed in Idaho. What crazy guys we were back then, signing up for the air force.”

“Well, pal, it was better than joining the navy! It kept us out of trouble and we got to see the world and more importantly it paid for flying school. Being a commercial pilot’s not so bad and you’re not up to your ears in debt like some of the guys who went into dentistry.”

“That’s true. But maybe they were smarter than us in some ways.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because it’s nine to five and you get to go home and kiss the wife and put the kids to bed and eat your supper and watch a game and terrorists aren’t aiming lasers at your eyes and administrators aren’t trying to do you out of your pension and you’re not stuck in Peoria with the plane five hours late and the passengers glaring at you because they think it’s your fault when in fact it’s related to the cutbacks in servicing the plane that they missed the tail light malfunctioning.”

“I’ll tell my dentist Fred that, the next time he starts complaining.”

“Yeah, right, whatever.”

Poor Jed, he was doing his best to be brave about the whole thing, but I knew that he was devastated about the breakup. He just wouldn’t talk about it and I sure as hell didn’t know how to make him and in fact I was a little intimidated by the task. Back in the service his nickname had been Still, because people never knew what he was thinking. The son of a Lutheran minister, he was polite and respectful. He kept quiet about his exploits, so that newcomers couldn’t believe that the quiet fellow who’d showed them around and walked them to the mess tent was the same fellow who was legendary for his daring landings and lift-offs, tactical planning and poise under fire. He had a strength that was like a muscle, there but not flexed. He was not emotional. He could analyze things so quickly, but wouldn’t necessarily offer a solution unless asked, asking a few questions, letting the men think they’d stumbled onto the answer themselves, keeping himself in the shadows, so it was only after they’d walked out of his quarters and were halfway to theirs, that they realized the sheer genius of their commander. We’d all been surprised when he fell so hard for Allison, who was so much his opposite in so many ways, and different from the other girls he’d dated. She was pretty of course, and smart, and a cousin of a pilot friend of his, but there was a wantonness, a wildness in her, not like the wild sweetness of blackberries, but something else, hard to place. It just didn’t fit with what we thought we knew about Still and we were all surprised at his choice, but unwilling to discuss it among our selves, as if doing so would cast doubt on his judgment. When we found out about the engagement, there was a sinking feeling, not just because now things would be different between the men and their leader, but because it didn’t seem quite right for him and yet we couldn’t tell him that. All through their long engagement, we hesitated, we didn’t even like to talk about it among ourselves. And when it finally fell apart, we weren’t really surprised, but we felt for him, felt his hurt, raged at his best man doing such a thing to our brother, and hated Allison with a passion, and yet we were relieved. But we simply couldn’t tell him.

The steaks arrived and we ate in silence. They were actually good steaks. The singer had finished with the Eagles, and had now gone on to a tortured version of Tracey Chapman’s “Give me one reason to stay here and I’ll turn my back around.” A trio of guys at the table behind us was singing, in falsetto: “Give HIM one reason to stay here and we’ll break your jaw for you!” and the singer, who was white, bald and pudgy and about five foot two, was glaring at them and cranking up the amp, which was the wrong thing to do as they only sang more loudly. One of them, a tall skinny guy wearing red Hawaiian shorts and no T-shirt, actually had stood up and was singing into an inverted Heinz ketchup bottle while the other two swayed in their chairs and hummed along until the next chorus. Thankfully, the singing contest was halted by one quick-thinking patron yanking the cord to the amplifier out of the extension cord that snaked over to the wall socket. “About time,” said Jed, cheering up a bit, “He’s lucky they didn’t throw him in the pool!”

“We’re lucky they didn’t throw the other end of the extension cord in the pool,” I said instantly, thinking of the girls getting electrocuted. I’d been the squad’s safety officer and I could never quite shake it, the automatic scanning of the environment for seen and unseen risks. But I didn’t want Jed thinking about past missions, so I decided I’d better quickly change topics. We’ll talk horses, I thought, and then we’ll get through our steaks, and then we’ll play billiards and that should get us through the night.

So I reminded him of the fun we’d had riding bareback on the ranch in Arizona all those summers ago and he nodded and said he’d like to do it again some day. I told him I had been looking through the Maui Guide that the car rental agency had given us when we asked for maps and there was some ranch about thirty miles away with horseback tours and also some eco-tours where you hiked for a few hours and then rappelled down a series of gulches using harnesses and pulleys and he said that sounded like fun and we’d look into it in the morning.

We had coffee and brandy and paid our tab and Paul, our bartender, made some calls and signaled to us at 8:10 p.m. to follow him. Just when we were leaving, he winked at me and put a cassette into the player under the bar counter, and out comes “Hawaii-Five-Oh” and the replacement bartender looked stunned and made a move as if to cross the bar and shut it off, but Paul shook his head and drew his finger across his throat and the new bartender nodded and went back to loading ice cubes in his blender but, happily, refrained from turning it on until the song finished. Jed smiled but didn’t say anything; I introduced him to Paul and outlined our plan, and when the song finished we crossed the little foot bridge and went past the pond of koi into the main building, taking our brandies with us.

Paul led us to a door, handed me the package of cigars and two ashtrays and headed up to the front desk. He came back a few minutes later with his buddy, Frank, a British chap who was one of the senior managers and thrilled to have an excuse to get out of his office. Frank unlocked the room, switched on the lights, opened the windows and patio doors at the far end of the room and told us we could smoke as long as we did it on the patio.

We lifted the dust cover off one of the massive tables and I got two cues down off the wall rack. Jed racked the reds with the triangle, and carefully placed the pink ball just ahead of their apex. Frank placed the coloured balls in their assigned places on the baulk line and centre line and the black ball at the foot of the table. Since neither Paul or I had ever played snooker before, Jed and Frank elected to go first and show us the rules as they went along. They chalked their cues and Jed made the opening break.

Needless to say, it turned out to be one fabulous evening. Frank regaled us with the history of billiards right back to its beginnings in France in the fifteenth century as an outdoor game played on a grass lawn with the players poking the balls with spoonlike sticks. He explained how the game moved indoors and onto tables and how enterprising players used the narrow “backside” of the cue to propel the ball faster. He told us about Francois Mingaud, an officer in Napoleon’s army, who ended up in the Bastille as a political prisoner and spent his days perfecting his shots; he actually asked to stay in prison longer to be able to continue playing billiards! In 1790, using a file, he had rounded the formerly square tip of the cue, greatly improving his ability to control the ball. In 1807 he improvised a leather tip to stop the cue slipping off the ball and found he could play an amazing number of shots this way. Jed explained how vulcanized rubber in the 1830s was used on the table edges so that the balls would smartly rebound and create a number of new shots. Frank taught Paul and me a number of trick shots, some rumored to have been perfected by Mingaud himself. Not to be outdone, Jed showed us some of his trick shots and told us about a British officer stationed in India, Neville Chamberlain, (no relation to the British prime minister) adding extra coloured balls to a game of billiards for fun one day in 1875 and in the process inventing snooker, the name coming from a derogatory term for a first year military cadet. The legendary billiards player John Roberts Jr. was rumoured to have traveled to India just to meet Chamberlain and learn the game. We smoked our stogies and reminisced about what it must have been like in those days.

By the time we’d played six racks apiece on the two tables, it was ten p.m. and we were all yawning. We’d kept to our bargain and smoked the cigars outside on the patio, soothed by the lilting music of ukulele drifting in from somewhere on the beach. We sent out to the main bar for a last round of drinks and we toasted Paul and Frank as hoteliers of the year and they toasted us as friends of the year and then it was time to wrap up and we shook hands, closed up the room, and we went off to bed. The next day we went horseback riding at nine and when we got back to the hotel we heard about the tsunami and it put everything into a new perspective and we swore off drinking for the rest of our holiday and donated the money to the Red Cross for the tsunami relief effort. Jed took a leave and volunteered as a helicopter pilot and along the way met Lara, a nurse, and everything is so much better. Well, maybe not the lounge singer; there’s not much hope for him.