1/21: Kenny

There is a man named Kenny who roams the island. The island is not so big actually, so Kenny's dark wrinkled face and coconut white beard are well known. He is small but strong and bronzed from a life on beaches and in the back of trucks. He began appearing at my farm and hostel last week, after Hans met him on the bus.

I thought he was aggravatingly strange at first. I thought he was just a cryptic bum with a polished ivory smile, waiting to steal our dishes when we slept. He expresses careless happiness I mistook for drunkenness, and he laughs like has a fish swimming in the bottom of his belly. But the more he has stayed here the more I realize he is the truest form of the island Mana.

He has become something of a rustic teacher and father figure. I came home form work today to see him prodding a fire beneath a smoking rack of meat, next to an old truck with mattresses piled in its back, where he had slept the night before. I whined to him about my oppressive boss, who directed me moving boxes with caustic comments. I told him of how I fell through the rotted floor of a farm building on the job, and my boss walked past without a word of concern.

Kenny beamed at me with his smile that dissolved the malice behind my eyes. He wears a look that is both tragic and ecstatic. "Brother, don't be upset by that man," he said. "He doesn't know where he is."