It was the air-conditioning that won us over. While our parents were fuming over the unsuccessful petitions and plotting the political demise of The Devil, he was sagely spending his time giving us rides after school in his air conditioned Cadillac that was colder on the inside than any of us could imagine.
It started with a contest that someone had come up with: Whoever could keep their hand on the car the longest became the kodomo taisho that day, the kid general. It was a brilliant idea because it did not involve athletic ability (which favored the boys) or anything we were supposed to remember from school (which favored the girls); the winner was merely the person who could endure the most pain. Since most of us were just one generation away from immigrant stock, we all felt our pain thresholds had been sufficiently tested despite our tender age.
Everyone knew that the car belonged to The Devil: Who else in Hawaii would own a black car with a black interior? From the time he arrived shortly after sunup, that car baked in the sun at the housing project he was developing next to our lane, so that by the time we got home from school, the car was hotter than lava. This went on for a couple of days: us guys leaving the lane, sneaking over to the building site and laying our hands on the car for the five or ten seconds it would take to determine a winner. We were always careful to make sure that the car was between us and the line of sight of the workers. What we neglected to check was that the car was unoccupied. So, one afternoon right after we had all slapped our hands down onto the car, the passenger door flew open and out stepped The Devil.
Most of us fled like cockroaches caught in the kitchen except Shane, who had his eyes closed. There are two types of kids: those who want to see what is coming at them no matter how painful, and those who can’t bear to watch. Shane was one of the latter kind. He closed his eyes during dodgeball, he closed his eyes when we jumped out of the swings, he even closed his eyes when the teacher asked him to spell a word during class. Of course, he would close his eyes when he was enduring the pain of laying hands on the car, and of course he would be the one who got caught.
Shane told us later that what made him open his eyes was not the sound of the car door opening—“I never hear nothing”—but the cool gust that washed over his feet – “Like when the top of the shave ice fall off and you try catch ‘em with your feet.” The braver among us peeked from wherever we were hiding to see Shane and The Devil conversing, but we couldn’t hear them. It seemed like they were talking for quite a while when suddenly Shane got into the car. 
