Hotel Honolulu

70 Hawaiian Snow

On another boys' night (the gathering of Buddy's hui was a weekly event now that he had moved into the hotel), Buddy announced that he was cold — and not just cold but freezing. We were in Paradise Lost, Buddy and his friends. No one spoke, some of us hummed, we were so stumped for a reply. It was the hottest week of the year, Kona weather in mid- August, a humid southerly air flow without enough motion to lift the hotel's little flag. The whole of Waikiki howled with air conditioners that seemed to strain in first gear, pouring out mildew and noise. And our cooling system had blown. I was waiting for the man from Hawaiian Snow Climate Control to arrive, though I did not say so.

"My feet are like ice," Buddy said. "Go ahead, feel my hands."

No one dared. Buddy looked concussed. He had a dark, roasted- looking face; he had to be feverish. But cold? The temperature was in the nineties, the humidity just below that, giving the hot Honolulu streets the ripe stink of gasoline and garbage. The throb of overheated metal on car bodies made them look explosive. The sky was sealed, like the inside of a great sagging tent, low and gray with volcanic dust that had drifted in from the live craters of the Big Island. The air was sour with heat, the hotel door handles sticky from people clutching ice cream cones. Purple car fumes collected and thickened, as pretty as poison rising in the traffic. There was

no surf. There seldom was on such days. Waves broke at the shore in low exhausted plops and were sieved by the hot sand on which barefoot tourists danced in pain. Offshore, the "vog" of the furry sky gave the motionless sea the overboiled appearance of reheated soup, and in places the ocean was as scummy and opaque as tepid bath water. Even the nonperspiring Japanese were glowing.

"Fucking freezing," Buddy said, angry because no one had spoken, nor had anyone taken up his challenge to feel his cold hands.

Just then I noticed Tran in front of the open refrigerator, pretending to be searching for a water jug but in fact snorting the cool air for relief.

Buddy hugged himself. He had to be feverish. He was gray, his eyes colorless.

"Look, I got chicken skin!"

His forearm, and even Pinky's bite marks that looked like tattoos, had the puckered texture of a cheese grater. Perhaps it was an effect of his drinking, for these days he was drunk well before noon.

To change the subject, I said, "Where's Pinky?"

"You tell me where she is," he said. "No, don't tell me. She makes me feel sick."

He had once told me that being with her or any woman for a long period killed his ardor. He needed to be away to stimulate his sex drive.

That was one of his stories. Another was that he had no sex drive, and his saying he was cold reminded me of that.

Apparently he wasn't kidding. He wore a sweater and knee socks, and still he shivered, rattling the ice in his glass of vodka.

"Aren't any of you guys cold?"

Only Tran glanced up at him. The others — Sandford, Willis, Lemmo, and Peewee — looked at each other open-mouthed, gasping, haggard from the awful heat.

"The air con's down," Lemmo said.

"Good!"

Buddy looked pitiable, sallow, underdressed, and a bit waiflike in his little-boy clothes — shorts and socks and sandals. His blotchy hands reminded me of the word "extremities."

"Now that you mention it," Sandford said, "it is kind of cool, I guess."

"Not cool — cold!"

"Yah. What I meant."

But Sandford was perspiring and spoke through his doggy gaping mouth. He was hot, they all were, the whole island was complaining, the usual talk: it was global warming, the greenhouse effect, El Nino. Yet the boss said he was cold, so the rest of them conceded that they were, too, as a gesture of submission and friendship.

"My room's like an igloo," Buddy said.

"It's just that I've seen it so much worse than this," Sandford said, struggling to be reasonable. "Back home in Rochester in the winter of '78 the ground was frozen so hard they couldn't bury bodies for two months. Piles of corpses stacked up in warehouses."

"Don't mention corpses," Buddy said.

"Met this stewardess one time on the mainland," Peewee said. "She had this funny-shaped nose. I says, 'That's interesting,' and she says, 'Frostbite. Took off the tip of my nose. I was with Alaska Air then, based out of Anchorage.'"

"Some places have snow all the time — just winter," Tran said. "A Canadian guest told me that. 'Summer? Some years we don't have summer.' I thought it was funny."

He was digging ice in the ice cube bin with the big aluminum scoop when he said this, which made it a sharper and more somber allusion.

"It's not funny," Buddy said angrily.

The phone rang. Tran rushed for it to avoid having to face Buddy's wrath.

"It's for you." He handed me the receiver.

"Whyan Snow," I heard — the electrician, but I didn't say so. He had come to fix the air conditioner.

At first I was glad to leave the confusion upstairs, but then I was standing in the suffocating heat of the dark hotel basement with a man I didn't know, waiting for him to speak. Minutes ago I had said, "So what do you think?" and he had not replied.

He shone his flashlight, caught the yellow glint of rats' eyes, but the creatures were defiant. They squatted, sniffing, waiting for us to leave, thickening their bodies in protest: this was their home.

At last the electrician spoke. "This all there is?"

What he meant I had no idea.

"I can't see what you're shining your light at."

"That you panel," he said. "Junction box. Timers. Any other feeds?"

This talk made him seem intelligent. But then he went silent again.

He resembled his own flickering flashlight — bright-dark, bright-dark.

"Maybe it's a fuse," I said.

"You mean circuit breaker?" He snapped a wired pair of metal clips onto two parts of the box. I braced myself for an explosion. "Nothing," he said in the manner of a pronouncement. "See, your voltage.

His precise technical language was at odds with his clothes — Ukulele Festival T-shirt, grease-smeared pants riding low from the weight of his

tool belt — and he didn't seem to know anything else. He was tapping a clutch of wires with a gauge.

"They bring these in from the mainland."

"Whereabouts?"

He just smiled. In his mind, the mainland was one simple place, not many different, highly complex ones, like the Hawaiian Islands — a notion I had almost begun to subscribe to myself after all these years.

"You Australian?"

"Do I sound Australian?" I said, controlling myself, out of the belief that you had to stay on the best of terms with noncommittal handymen and mechanics.

"Buddy said something about you being from off island. How's he doing?"

"Buddy?" I'm fucking freezing. "He's living in the hotel now with his

wife."

"He's on his fourth wife now. Me, I'm on my second. What wife you

on?"

"Second," I said, hating his question.

"I go fix this. Got a short in one breaker. Maybe bad wire. Got to look at the spec sheet, see the tolerances. Some of them are forgiving, some no. The power surges kill you."

I just stared at his chubby cheeks through his dim light.

A moment later he said, "Yah. I figure. Gecko. Buggers get inside and lay eggs."

A three-inch lizard and its pea-sized eggs had shut down the entire hotel air-conditioning system.

Upstairs, Buddy and his friends were still at it. As soon as I entered Paradise Lost I heard the ice rattling in glasses and Buddy saying, "Sure it is. Medical science will tell you that temperature going down is much worse than temperature going up."

"I could never take another winter like that," Sandford said.

"You can get snow in Nevada," Lemmo said. "I seen it one time when I was going to Vegas. Was a frost. I try open a gate lock with my mouth and the iron stick my lips. Was painful!"

"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.