“Fuck you,” Mike says, pushing himself away from the machine. “Fuck you!”
Jeton isn’t sure if he is saying this to the machine or to him.
“Good reflexes,” Jeton mocks.
Mike stands up slowly, wipes his hands on his blue jeans, then—without looking at Jeton—turns away and walks to the door. He has the kind of intent, closed-up look on his face that Jeton has seen on men who fight cocks.
“Your causeway ruins us!” Jeton calls after him.
As soon as Mike is gone and the door has shut out the bright sunlight again, Jeton feels terrible. Why has he treated his cousin so badly?
He hears the young men laughing from the front of the room. Maybe laughing at him. He hears the Spanish program speaking its musical language from the TV set behind the bar. And somewhere at the back of his mind he hears the video game blowing up spiders and spaceships.
When he gets outside, to the rain-puddled street, the air thick with lunch-time aromas—of bwiin-enno, fried leeks and sausage—he does not see Mike. Small children who should be in school are playing tag, darting from and through the narrow paths between the hunched-up houses. Like shrimp in tide pools. Several young men and a few older men are sitting in the shade of a breadfruit tree nearby, sharing cigarettes. Men and women are walking away from him, each carrying a straw or plastic bag, on their way to catch the two o’clock ferry to Kwajalein.
Jeton knows that when he sees Mike again, Mike will have forgotten that Jeton was so kajjōjō, hateful. That is how it is with the ri-je. Americans are different: they will not let you forget anything.
Jeton could jaba, hang-out, with the men by the tree but they are going to talk about women and Jeton does not want to talk about his.
Maybe he will go to the pier, where there are a couple of bars and restaurants. Maybe someone will offer to buy him a bowl of fried egg and rice.
He could go home, but no one is there. His mother is a maid on Kwajalein, his sister a checker at the Americans’ supermarket there. His younger brother and sister are at school. Or maybe playing in the alleys. His older brother is on Majuro working with his father, who makes soap in the copra factory. They visit Ebeye every three months, bringing with them samples from the factory and smelling of coconut that seems to have gotten into their breath and become a part of their body sweat.
This is something else he never thought of until he met Nora. His smell. Nora says to him, “I love your smell. It’s so un-American.” This seems to be a good thing, though Jeton does not know what it means. And he is afraid to ask. Where is Nora now? He wants to fuck her bad. He wants to love her hard. He wants to be with her forever.
“These are the only places you’ll find authentic Marshallese food,” Mister Norman says. He’s treating the DDs to lunch at one of Ebeye’s” “take-outs,” a plywood shack about five by four feet, with a single large open window for service. “We should try some jukjuk and bwiro!”
“What?”
“Coconut-rice balls and preserved breadfruit!”
The woman inside looks to Nora like every middle-aged Marshallese woman she’s seen: heavy, her hair pulled back but messy from the humidity, her face broad and friendly and without a dab of makeup. She wears a cotton shift of a brightly flowered pattern.
Her take-out is well-provisioned, the shelves behind her displaying stacks of Huggies disposable diapers, cans of Starkist tuna, boxes of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, piles of Snickers candy bars, and stacked tins of SPAM, the national favorite. None of it is cheap.
Mister Norman pays for the Marshallese stuff—“real food,” he calls it—then passes it around.
Tabatha grimaces at the brownish paste on her pandanus leaf. “Is this gonna make us sick?”
“It’s a miracle the crap you eat every day doesn’t make you sick,” Mister Norman says, downing a handful of raw papaya strips—which are so crunchy they sound like potato chips as he chews.
Nora pretends to enjoy the Diversity lunch but drops her serving behind her into the weeds. All she can think about is finding Jeton.
Before Gus and Jan grounded her, they let her meet Jeton one more time—at Kwajalein’s Emon beach on a Saturday afternoon. She couldn’t get into trouble there. Jeton showed up looking sweaty and worried, his visitor’s tag clipped to the tail of his T-shirt. Nora was sitting on a picnic table in the only empty pavilion. She patted the plastic bench for him to sit beside her. Nervously, he glanced beyond the pavilion, then pecked her on the forehead. It was the usual blinding sunny afternoon, big silver-white clouds floating fast in a dreamy blue sky. Children were frolicking noisily in the swim area, marked off with orange floats.
Some teenagers were water skiing farther out, several of them sprawled on the ski deck. Though Nora knows she could do it if she tried—she’s an athlete—she hasn’t learned to water ski in the two years she’s been living on Kwaj. Ironic, isn’t it? Like living in Manhattan and never visiting the Statue of Liberty. It’s something she’ll joke about with her college friends, she has decided. The secret truth is, she’s afraid to swim out to the ski deck. It’s moored over the drop-off, where the white sand falls away hundreds of feet into the black-blue depths of the lagoon.
The drop-off! You’re swimming along in the bath-warm water and you can see the squiggly white-sandy coral-studded bottom and then suddenly it’s gone and the water goes cold as a deep-bottom current thrills between your legs and there’s nothing below but darkness, not a single fish anymore, and it’s like you’re drifting all alone in deep space. A shark or something could snatch you in an instant and drag you down and nobody would be able to help you. Gone! That’s what the drop-off is about. That’s why Nora has never learned to ski.
When Nora told Jeton she got accepted to Cal State-Sacramento and would be living with her grandparents next year, Jeton fell silent and drew back. He kept turning his head and squinting at her like she’d suddenly gone invisible.
“College!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you happy for me?”
After a long silence, in which Jeton stared at the sandy concrete below his feet, he said, “You could go to college here.”
“Majuro?” she answered. “That’s junior college, Jeton. Cal State is a real college, the whole four years.”
He wiped at his face and pushed back his pretty black hair. “When does this college start?”
“September,” she said. “But I’m flying to Sacramento right after graduation.”
“June?”
“Jan and Gus insist,” she explained sadly.
“Because we are fucking?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You tell them you love me?”
She sighed. In some ways Jeton is just a boy. How could she explain that there is love and then there is love? Sure, she loves him. She’s never loved anybody more! But what does that mean, really? If she had to tell him the truth, she’d admit that all of this out here, as nice as it is, with the free movies and the year-round summer and all the great kids to hang with, it’s like a dream. But none of it sticks—that’s what she’d like to explain to Jeton. What really matters is life in the States, where people take notice. Most people in the States don’t even know about this little piece of America in the middle of the Pacific ocean!
“Aren’t you’re happy for me?” Nora asked.
Jeton, her lover, her sweet, good man, nodded yes. “You’re the best,” he said.
That