The curse of Lono

A Bantam Book / November 1983

Grateful acknowledgment is made lo'the Following for permission lo quole
from copyrighted material:

om The Las! Voyage of Captain James Conk by Richard Hough, copyright ©
1979 by Richard Hough. Used by permission of William Morrow & Co.. Inc.,
and Macmillan London Limited.

From Hawaiian Monarchy, The Romantic Years by Maxine Mrantz,

"The Law of the Splintered Oar" copyright © 1974 by Maxinc Mrantz.

Used by permission of Aloha Graphics & Sales, Inc.

From "Hula Hula Boys" by Warren Zevon, Lyrics reprinted permission of
Zevon Music (BMI). Copyright & 1982 by Zevon Music.

Text copyright © 1983 by Hunter S. Thompson Illustrations copyright ®
1983 by Ralph Steadman

All rights reserved.  ' ,

Produced by Lai la Nabulsi

Book design by Yaron Fldlcr.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by

mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: Bantam Books, Int.

Library of Congress Cataloging In Publication Data

Thompson, Hunter S. The curse of Lono.

i. Thompson, Hunter, S. 2. Journalists--United Slates--Biography..

3. Hawaii--Description and travel--1981- . I. Steadman, Ralph. II. Title.

PN4874.T444A33 1983 07p'.92'4 [B] , 83-90660

ISBN 0-553-01387-4 (pbk.)

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

*****

Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the

Arian brown, For the Christian riles, and the Arian smiles, and it weareth

the Christian down;

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name

of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: 'A Fool lies here who tried
to hustle

the East.'

Rudyard Kipling "The Naulahka"

*****

The Romantic God Lono

I have been writing a good deal, of late, about the great god Lono and
Captain Cook's personation of him. Now, while I am here in Lono's home,
upon ground which his terrible feet have trodden in remote ages--unless
these natives lie, and they would hardly do that I suppose--I might as
well tell who he was.

The idol the natives worshipped for him was a slender un-ornamented staff
twelve feet long. Unpoetical history says he was a favorite god on the
island of Hawaii--a great king who had been deified for meritorious
services--just our fashion of rewarding heroes, with the difference that
we would have made him a postmaster instead of a god, no doubt. In an
angry moment he slew his wife, a goddess named Kaikilani Alii. Remorse of
conscience drove him mad, and tradition presents us the singular spectacle
of a god traveling "on the shoulder"; for in his gnawing grief he wandered
about from place to place, boxing and wrestling with all whom he met. Of
course this pastime soon lost its novelty, inasmuch as it must necessarily
have been the case that when so powerful a deity sent a frail human
opponent "to grass," he never came back anymore. Therefore he instituted
games called makahiki, and ordered that they should be held in his honor,
and then sailed for foreign lands on a three-cornered raft, stating that
he would return some day, and that was the last of Lono. He was never seen
anymore; his raft got swamped perhaps. But the people always expected his
return, and they were easily led to accept Captain Cook as the restored
god.

Mark Twain Letters from Hawaii

*****

RUNNING

May 23, 1980

Hunter S. Thompson c/o General Delivery Woody Creek, CO

Dear Hunter:

To keep a potential screed down to a few lines, we would like you to cover
the Honolulu Marathon. We will pay all expenses and an excellent fee.
Please contact us.

Think about it. This is a good chance for a vacation. Sincerely,

Paul Perry Executive Editor, Running Magazine

October 25, 1980 Owl Farm

Dear Ralph,

I think we have a live one this time, old sport. Some dingbat named Perry
up in Oregon wants to give us a month in Hawaii for Christmas and all we
have to do is cover the Honolulu Marathon for his magazine, a thing called
Running. .. .

Yeah, I know what you're thinking, Ralph. You're pacing around over there
in the war room at the Old Loose Court and thinking, "Why me? And why now?
Just when I'm getting respectable?"

Well. . . let's face it, Ralph; anybody can be respectable, especially in
England. But not everybody can get paid to run like a bastard for 26 miles
in some maniac hype race called the Honolulu Marathon.

We are both entered in this event, Ralph, and I feel pretty confident
about winning. We will need a bit of training, but not much.

The main thing will be to run as an entry and set a killer pace for the
first three miles. These body-nazis have been training all year for the
supreme effort in this Super Bowl of marathons. The promoters expect
10,000 entrants, and the course is 26 miles; which means they will all
start slow . . . because 26 miles is a hell of a long way to run, for any
reason at all, and all the pros in this field will start slow and pace
themselves very carefully for the first 20 miles.

But not us, Ralph. We will come out of the blocks like human torpedoes and
alter the whole nature of the race by sprinting the first three miles
shoulder-to-shoulder in under 10 minutes.

A pace like that will crack their nuts, Ralph. These people are into
running, not racing--50 our strategy will be to race like whorehounds for
the first three miles. I figure we can crank ourselves up to a level of
frenzy that will clock about 9:55 at the three-mile checkpoint... which
will put us so far ahead of the field that they won't even be able to see
us. We will be over the hill and all alone when we hit the stretch along
Ala Moana Boulevard still running shoulder-to-shoulder at a pace so fast
and crazy that not even the judges will feel sane about it. . . and the
rest of the field will be left so far behind that many will be overcome
with blind rage and confusion.

I've also entered you in the Pipeline Masters, a world class surfing
contest on the north shore of  Oahu on Dec. 26.

You will need some work on your high-speed balance for this

one, Ralph. You'll be shot through the curl at speeds up to 50 or even 75
miles an hour, and you won't want to fall.

I won't be with you in the Pipeline gig, due to serious objections raised
by my attorney with regard to the urine test and other legal
ramifications.

But I will enter the infamous Listen Memorial Rooster Fight, at $1,000 per
unit on the universal scale--e.g., one minute in the cage with one rooster
wins $1,000 . .. or five minutes with one rooster is worth $5,000 .. . and
two minutes with five roosters is $10,000 ... etc.

This is serious business, Ralph. These Hawaiian slashing roosters can tear
a man to shreds in a matter of seconds, I am training here at home with
the peacocks--six 40-pound birds in a 6' x 6' cage, and I think I'm
getting the hang of it.

The time has come to kick ass, Ralph, even if it means coming briefly out
of retirement and dealing, once again, with the public. I am also in need
of a rest--for legal reasons--so I want this gig to be easy, and I know in
my heart that it will be.

Don't worry, Ralph. We will bend a few brains with this one. I have
already secured the Compound: two homes with a 50-meter pool on the edge
of the sea on Alii Drive in Kona, where the sun always shines.

OK

H.S.T.

THE BLUE ARM

We were about forty minutes out of San Francisco when the crew finally
decided to take action on the problem in Lavatory IB. The door had been
locked since takeoff and now the chief stewardess had r^1 summoned the
copilot down from the flight deck. He appeared in the aisle right beside
me, carrying a strange-looking black tool in his hand, like a flashlight
with blades, or some kind of electric chisel. He nodded calmly as he
listened to the stewardess's urgent whispering. "I can talk to him," she
said, pointing a long red fingernail at the "occupied" sign on the locked
toilet door, "but I can't get him out."

The copilot nodded thoughtfully, keeping his back to the passengers while
he made some adjustments on the commando tool he was holding. "Any ID?" he
asked her.

She glanced at a list on her clipboard. "Mr. Ackerman," she said.
"Address: Box 99, Kailua-Kona."

"The big island," he said.

She nodded, still consulting her clipboard. "Red Carpet Club member," she
said. "Frequent traveler, no previous history . . . boarded in San
Francisco, one-way first class to Honolulu. A perfect gentleman. No
connections booked." She continued, "No hotel reservations, no rental cars
. . ." She shrugged. "Very polite, sober, relaxed .. ."

"Yeah," he said. "I know the type." The officer stared down at his tool
for a moment, then raised his other hand and knocked sharply on the door.
"Mr. Ackerman?" he called. "Can you hear me?"

There was no answer, but I was close enough to the door to hear sounds of
movement inside: first, the bang of a toilet seat dropping, then running
water.. . ,

I didn't know Mr. Ackerman, but I remembered him coming aboard. He had the
look of a man who had once been a tennis pro in Hong Kong, then gone on to
bigger things. The gold Rolex, the white linen bush jacket, the Thai Bhat
chain around his neck, the heavy leather briefcase with combination locks
on every zipper. . . . These were not signs of a man who would lock
himself in the bathroom immediately after takeoff and stay inside for
almost an hour.

Which is too long, on any flight. That kind of behavior raises questions
that eventually become hard to ignore--especially in the spacious
first-class compartment on a 747 on a five-hour flight to Hawaii. People
who pay that kind of money don't like

the idea of having to stand in line to use the only available bathroom,
while something clearly wrong is going on in the other one.

I was one of these people.. .. My social contract with United Airlines
entitled me, I felt, to at least the use of a tin stand-up bathroom with a
lock on the door for as long as I needed to get myself cleaned up. I had
spent six hours hanging around the Red Carpet Room in the San Francisco
airport, arguing with ticket agents, drinking heavily and fending off
waves of strange memories. .. .

About halfway between Denver and San Francisco, we'd decided to change
planes and get on a 747 for the next leg. The DC-10 is nice for short hops
and sleeping, but the 747 is far better for the working professional on a
long haul--because the 747 has a dome lounge, a sort of club car on top of
the plane with couches and wooden card tables and its own separate bar,
which can only be reached by an iron spiral staircase in the first-class
compartment. It meant taking the chance of losing the luggage, and a
tortured layover in the San Francisco airport . . . but I needed room to
work, to spread out a bit, and maybe_ even sprawl.

My plan, on this night, was to look at all the research material I had on
Hawaii. There were memos and pamphlets to read--even books. I had Hough's
The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook, The Journal of William Ellis, and
Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii--big books and long pamphlets: "The
Island of Hawaii," "Kona Coast Story," "Pu'uhonua o Honaunau." All these
and many more.

"You can't just come out here and write about the marathon," my friend
John Wilbur had told me. "There's a hell of a lot more to Hawaii than ten
thousand Japs running past Pearl Harbor. Come on out," he said. "These
islands are full of mystery, never mind Don Ho and all the tourist
gibberish-- there's a hell of a lot more here than most people
understand."

Wonderful, I thought--Wilbur is wise. Anybody who can move from the
Washington Redskins to a house on the beach in Honolulu must understand
something about life that I don't.

Indeed. Deal with the mystery. Do it now. Anything that can create itself
by erupting out of the bowels of the Pacific Ocean is worth looking at.

After six hours of failure and drunken confusion, I had finally secured
two seats on the last 747 flight of the day to Honolulu.

Now I needed a place to shave, brush my teeth, and maybe just stand there
and look at myself in the mirror and wonder, as always, who might be
looking back.

There is no possible economic argument for a genuinely private place of
any kind on a ten million dollar flying machine. The risk is too high.

No. That makes no sense. Too many people like Master Sergeants forced into
early retirement have tried to set themselves on fire in these tin
cubicles . . . too many psychotics and half-mad dope addicts have locked
themselves inside, then gobbled pills and tried to flush themselves down
the long blue tube.

The copilot rapped on the door with his knuckles. "Mr. Ackerman! Are you
all right?"

He hesitated, then called again, much louder this time. "Mr. Ackerman!
This is your captain speaking. Are you sick?" "What?" said a voice from
inside.

The stewardess leaned close to the door. "This is a medical emergency, Mr.
Ackerman--we can get you out of there in thirty seconds if we have to."
She smiled triumphantly at Captain Goodwrench as the voice inside came
alive again. "I'm fine," it said. "I'll be out in a minute." The copilot
stood back and watched the door. There were more sounds of movement
inside--but nothing else, except the sound of running water.

By this time the entire first class cabin was alerted to the crisis. "Get
that freak out of there!" an old man shouted. "He might have a bomb!"

"Oh my God!" a woman screamed. "He's in there with something!"

The copilot flinched, then turned to face the passengers. He pointed his
tool at the old man, who was now becoming hysterical. "You!" he snapped.
"Shut up! I'll handle this."

Suddenly the door opened and Mr. Ackerman stepped out. He moved quickly
into the aisle and smiled at the stewardess. "Sorry to keep you waiting,"
he said. "It's all yours now." He was backing down the aisle, his bush
jacket draped casually over his arm, but not covering it.

From where I was sitting I could see that the arm he was trying to hide
from the stewardess was bright blue, all the way up to the shoulder. The
sight of it made me coil nervously into my seat. I had liked Mr. Ackerman,
at first. He had the look of a man who might share my own tastes .. . but
now he was looking like trouble, and I was ready to kick him in the balls
like a mule for any reason at all. My original impression of the man had
gone all to pieces by that time. This geek who had

locked himself in the bathroom for so long that one of his arms had turned
blue was not the same gracious, linen-draped Pacific yachtsman who had
boarded the plane in San Francisco.

Most of the other passengers seemed happy enough just to see the problem
come out of the bathroom peacefully: no sign of a weapon, no dynamite
taped to his chest, no screaming of incomprehensible terrorist slogans or
threatening to slit people's throats. . .. The old man was still sobbing
quietly, not looking at Ackerman as he continued to back down the aisle
toward his own seat, but nobody else seemed worried.

The copilot, however, was staring at Ackerman with an expression of pure
horror on his face. He had seen the blue arm-- and so had the stewardess,
who was saying nothing at all. Ackerman was still trying to keep his arm
hidden under the bush jacket. None of the other passengers had noticed
it--or, if they had, they didn't know what it meant.

But I did, and so did the bug-eyed stewardess. The copilot gave Ackerman
one last withering glance, then shuddered with obvious disgust as he
closed up his commando tool and moved away. On his way to the spiral
staircase that led back upstairs to the flight deck, he paused right above
me in the aisle and whispered to Ackerman: "You filthy bastard, don't ever
let me catch you on one of my flights again."

I saw Ackerman nod politely, then he slid into his seat just across the
aisle from me. I quickly stood up and moved toward the bathroom with my
shaving kit in my hand--and when I'd locked myself safely inside I
carefully closed the toilet seat before I did anything else.

There is only one way to get your arm dyed blue on a 747 flying at 38,000
feet over the Pacific. But the truth is so rare and unlikely that not even
the most frequent air travelers have ever had to confront it--and it is
usually not a thing that the few who understand want to talk about.

The powerful disinfectant that most airlines use in their toilet-flushing
facilities is a chemical compound known as Dejerm, which is colored a very
vivid blue. The only other time I ever saw a man come out of an airplane
bathroom with a blue arm was on a long flight from London to Zaire, en
route to the Ali-Foreman fight. A British news correspondent from Reuters
had gone into the bathroom and somehow managed to drop his only key to the
Reuters telex machine in Kinshasa down the aluminum bowl. He emerged about
30 minutes later, and he had a whole row to himself the rest of the way to
Zaire.

It was almost midnight when I emerged from Lavatory IB and went back to my
seat to gather up my research material. The

overhead lights were out and the other passengers were sleeping. It was
time to go upstairs to the dome lounge and get some work done. The
Honolulu Marathon would be only one part of the story. The rest would have
to deal with Hawaii itself, and that was something I'd never had any
reason to even think about. I had a quart of Wild Turkey in my satchel,
and I knew there was plenty of ice upstairs in the dome bar, which is
usually empty at night.

But not this time. When I got to the top of the spiral staircase I saw my
fellow traveler, Mr. Ackerman, sleeping peacefully on one of the couches
near the bar. He woke up as I passed by on my way to a table in the rear,
and I thought I saw a flicker of recognition in the weary smile on his
face.

I nodded casually as I passed. "I hope you found it," I said.

He looked up at me. "Yeah," he said. "Of course."

By this time I was ten feet behind him and spreading my research materials
out on the big card table. Whatever it was, I didn't want to know about
it. He had his problems and I had mine. I had hoped to have the dome to
myself for these hours, to be alone, but Mr. Ackerman was obviously
settled in for the night. It was the only place on the plane where his
presence wouldn't cause trouble. He would be with me for a while, so I
figured we might as well get along.

There was a strong odor of disinfectant in the air. The whole dome smelled
like the basement of a bad hospital. I opened all the air vents above my
seat, then spread my research out on the table. I tried to remember if the
British correspondent had suffered any pain or injury from his experience,
but all that came to mind was that he wore heavy long-sleeved shirts the
whole time he was in Zaire. No loss of flesh, no poison oil in the nervous
system, but three weeks in the heat of the Congo had caused an awful
fungus to come alive on his arm, and when I saw him in London two months
later his hand was still noticeably blue.

I walked up to the bar and got some ice for my drink. On the way back to
my desk I asked him, "How's your arm?"

"Blue," he replied. "And it itches."

I nodded. "That's powerful stuff. You should probably check with a doctor
when you get to Honolulu."

He eased up in his seat and looked back at me. "Aren't you a doctor?" he
asked.

"What?"

He smiled and lit a cigarette. "It's on your luggage tags," he said. "It
says you're a doctor."

I laughed, and looked down at my satchel. Sure enough, the Red Carpet Club
baggage tag said, "Dr. H. S. Thompson."

"Jesus," I said. "You're right. I am a doctor."

He shrugged.

"Okay," I said finally, "let's get that weird shit off your arm." I stood
up and motioned him to follow me into the tiny "crew only" bathroom behind
the flight deck. We spent the next 20 minutes scrubbing his arm with
soap-soaked paper towels, then I rubbed it down with a jar of cold cream
from my shaving kit.

A nasty red rash like poison ivy had broken out all over his arm,
thousands of filthy little bubbles. ... I went back to my bag for a tube
of Desenex, to kill the itching. There was no way to get rid of the blue
dye.

"What?" he said. "It won't wash off?"

"No," I told him. "Maybe two weeks in saltwater can dull it out. Get out
in the surf, hang around on the beach."

He looked confused. "The beach?"

"Yeah," I said. "Just go out there and do it. Tell them whatever you have
to, call it a birthmark. . . ."

He nodded. "Yeah. That's good, Doc--what blue arm? Right?"

"Right," I said. "Never apologize, never explain. Just act normal and
bleach the bugger out. You'll be famous on Waikiki Beach."

He laughed. "Thanks, Doc. Maybe I can do you a favor sometime--what brings
you to Hawaii?"

"Business," I said. "I'm covering the Honolulu Marathon for a medical
journal."

He nodded and sat down, stretching his blue arm out on the couch to give
it some air. "Well," he said finally, "whatever you say, Doc." He grinned
mischievously. "A medical journal. Jesus, that's good."

"What?"

He nodded thoughtfully and put his feet up on the table in front of him,
then turned to smile at me. "I was just wondering how I might return the
favor," he said. "You staying long in the islands?"

"Not in Honolulu," I said. "Just until after the Marathon on Saturday,
then we're going over to a place called Kona."

;'Kona?"

"Yeah," I said, leaning back and opening one of my books, a
nineteenth-century volume titled The Journal of William Ellis.

He leaned back on the cushions and closed his eyes again. "It[(]'s a nice
place," he said. "You'll like it."

"Well," I said, "that's good to know. I've already paid for it."

"Paid?"

"Yeah. I rented two houses on the beach."

He looked up. "You paid in advance?"

I nodded. "That was the only way I could get anything," I said. "The whole
place is booked up."

"What?" He jerked up in his seat and stared back at me. "Booked up? What
the hell are you renting--the Kona Village?"

I shook my head. "No," I said. "It's some kind of estate with two big
houses and a pool, pretty far out of town."

"Where?" he asked.

There was something wrong with the tone of his voice, but I tried to
ignore it. Whatever he was about to tell me, I felt, was something I
didn't want to hear. "Some friends found it for me," I said quickly. "It's
right on the beach. Totally private. We have to get a lot of work done."

Now he was definitely looking troubled. "Who'd you rent it from?" he
asked. And then he mentioned the name of the real estate agent that I had,
in fact, rented it from. The look on my face must have alarmed him,
because he instantly changed the subject.

"Why Kona?" he asked. "You want to catch fish?"

I shrugged. "Not especially. But I want to get out on the water, do some
diving. A friend of mine has a boat over there."

"Oh? Who's that?"

"A guy from Honolulu," I said. "Gene Skinner."

He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Sure, I know Gene--The Blue Boar." He leaned
up from the cushions and turned to look back at me, no longer half asleep.
"He's a friend of yours?"

I nodded, surprised by the smile on his face. It was a smile I had seen
before, but for a moment I couldn't place it.

Ackerman was still looking at me, an odd new light in his eyes. "Haven't
seen him in a while," he said. "He's back in Hawaii?"

Whoops, I thought. Something wrong here. I recognized that smile now; I
had seen it on the faces of other men, in other countries, at the mention
of Skinner's name.

"Who?" I said, standing up to get some more ice.

"Skinner," he said.

"Back from where?" I wanted no part of Skinner's ancient feuds.

He seemed to understand. "You know anybody else in Kona?" he asked.
"Besides Skinner?"

"Yeah," I said. "I know some people in the whiskey business. I know some
real estate agents."

He nodded thoughtfully, staring down at the long fingers of his
freshly-blued hand as if he'd just noticed something odd about it. I
recognized the professional pause of a man long accustomed to the sound of
his own brain working. I could

almost hear it--the high-speed memory-scan of a very personal computer
that would sooner or later come up with whatever fact, link, or
long-forgotten detail he was waiting for.

He closed his eyes again. "The big island is different from the others,"
he said. "Especially that mess in Honolulu. It's like going back in time.
Nobody hassles you, plenty of space to

move around. It's probably the only place in the islands where the people
have any sense of the old Hawaiian culture."

"Wonderful," I said. "We'll be there next week. All we have to do in
Honolulu is cover the Marathon, then hide out in Kona for a while and lash
the story together."

"Right," he said. "Call me when you get settled in. I can take you around
to some of the places where the old magic still lives." He smiled
thoughtfully. "Yeah, we can go down to South Point, the City of Refuge,
spend some time with the ghost of Captain Cook. Hell, we might even do
some diving-- if the weather's right."

I put my book down and we talked for a while. It was the first time
anybody had ever told me anything interesting about Hawaii-- the native
legends, old wars, missionaries, the strange and terrible fate of Captain
Cook. "This City of Refuge looks interesting," I said. "You don't find
many cultures with a sense of sanctuary that powerful."

"Yeah," he said, "but you had to get there first, and you had to be faster
than whoever was chasing you."

*****

City of Refuge at Honaunau

Adjoining the Hare o Keave to the southward, we found a Pahu tabu (sacred
enclosure) of considerable extent, and were informed by our guide that it
was one of the puhonuas of Hawaii, of which we had so often heard the
chiefs and others speak. There are only two on the island; the one which
we were then examining, and another at Waipio, on the north-east part of
the island, in the district of Kohala.

These puhonuas were the Hawaiian cities of refuge, and afforded an
inviolable sanctuary to the guilty fugitive who, when flying from the
avenging spear, was so favoured as to enter their precincts.

This had several wide entrances, some on the side next the sea, the others
facing the mountains. Hither the manslayer, the man who had broken a tabu,
or failed in the observance of its rigid requirements, the thief, and even
the murderer, fled from his incensed pursuers, and was secure.

To whomsoever he belonged, and from whatever part he came, he was equally
certain of admittance, though liable to be pursued even to the gates of
the enclosure.

Happily for him, those gates were perpetually open; and as soon as the
fugitive had entered, he repaired to the presence of the idol, and made a
short ejaculatory address, expressive of his obligations to him in
reaching the place with security.

The priests, and their adherents, would immediately put to death any one
who should have the temerity to follow or molest those who were once
within the pale of the pahu tabu; and, as they expressed it, under the
shade or protection of the spirit of Keave, the tutelar deity of the
place.

We could not learn the length of time it was necessary for them to remain
in the puhonua; but it did not appear to be more than two or three days.
After that, they either attached themselves to the service of the priests,
or returned to their homes.

The puhonua at Honaunau is capacious, capable of containing a vast
multitude of people. In time of war, the females, children, and old people
of the neighboring districts, were generally left within it, while the men
went to battle. Here they awaited in safety the issue of the conflict, and
were secure against surprise and destruction, in the event of a defeat.

The Journal of William Ellis (Circa 1850)

*****

He chuckled. "It was a sporting proposition, for sure."

"But once you got there," I said, "you were absolutely protected--right?"

"Absolutely," he said. "Not even the gods could touch you, once you got
through the gate."

"Wonderful," I said. "I might need a place like that."

"Yeah," he said. "Me too. That's why I live where I do."

"Where?"

He smiled. "On a clear day I can look down the mountain and see the City
of Refuge from my front porch. It gives me a great sense of comfort."

I had a feeling that he was telling the truth. Whatever kind of life
Ackerman lived seemed to require a built-in fall-back position. You don't
find many investment counselers from Hawaii or anywhere else who can drop
anything so important down the tube in a 747 bathroom that they will get
their arms dyed bright blue to retrieve it.

We were alone in the dome, 38,000 feet above the Pacific with at least
another two hours to go. We would be in Honolulu sometime around sunrise.
Over the top of my book I could see him half-asleep but constantly
scratching his arm. His eyes were closed, but the fingers of his clean
hand were wide awake and his spastic movements were beginning to get on my
nerves.

The stewardess came up to have a look at us, but the sight of Ackerman's
arm made her face quiver and she quickly went back down the stairs. We had
a small icebox full of Miller High Life and a whole selection of
mini-bottles in the liquor drawer, so there was no need to do anything but
keep a wary eye on Ackerman.

Finally he seemed to be asleep. The dome was dark, except for the small
glow of table lights, and I settled back on the couch to ponder my
research material.

The main impression I recall from what I read in those hours is that the
Hawaiian Islands had no written history at all beyond the past two hundred
years, when the first missionaries and sea captains began trying to
interpret a chronology of some kind by listening to tales told by natives.
Nobody even knew where the islands themselves had come from, much less the
people.

On the gray afternoon of January 16, 1779, Captain James Cook, the
greatest explorer of his age, sailed the two ships of his Third Pacific
Expedition into the tiny rock-walled shelter of Kealakekua Bay on the west
coast of a previously uncharted mid-Pacific island called "Owhyhee" by the
natives, and found his place in history as the first white man to
officially "discover" the Hawaiian Islands.

The bay inside the channel was shrouded in fog and surrounded by a wall of
sheer cliffs, 500 feet high. It looked more like a tomb than a harbor,
and--despite the desperate condition of his ships and his crews after ten
days in a killer monsoon-- Cook was reluctant to enter. But he had no
choice: his crew was threatening mutiny, scurvy was rampant, his ships
were coming apart beneath his feet, and the morale of his whole Expedition
had collapsed after six months at sea in the Arctic.... And now, after
sailing straight south from Alaska in a condition of genuine hysteria, the
mere sight of land made them crazy.

So Cook took them in. Kealakekua Bay wasn't the kind of safe anchorage he
wanted. But it was the only one available in what turned out to be his
last storm.

*****

Early on the morning of 16 January [1779], Cook said to his master, "Mr.
Bligh, be so good as to take a boat, well armed, and take soundings." They
could both make out what Cook called "the appearance of a bay."

"It seems promising, sir, and the indians friendly enough," said Bligh.

Cook spoke harshly. "Whatever the nature of the indians, if it is a safe
anchorage, I shall resolve to anchor in it. This has been a poor island
for shelter and our need to refit is very great."

Bligh, accompanied by Edgar in a boat from the Discovery, set his men to
row on a north-easterly heading for a deep cup cut into the cliffs,
meeting on the way a great armada of canoes of many sizes, all bustling
towards the ships at twice their own speed and waving their paddles and
streamers and singing out as they passed.

As Bligh closed the shore he became more than ever confident that this
would be a safe anchorage for them. It appeared protected from all points,
except the south-west, and from his recent observations gales from this
quarter were unlikely. The dominant feature of this bay was a cliff like a
knife-cut through black volcanic rock in a slight curve, falling from some
400 feet at the eastern extremity to a point a mile to the west where it
shelved into gently rising land from the western promontory of the bay.
This cliff, this black insurmountable barrier to the hinterland, appeared
to fall directly to the sea, but as the day wore on and the tide ebbed,
Bligh observed that there was a narrow beach at its base--black rocks and
pebbles. As they were to learn later, the name of this bay, Kealakekua
(Karakakooa, Cook called it) means "path of the gods," deriving from this
great slide in the hill to the sea.

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

*****

I was still reading when the stewardess appeared to announce that we'd be
landing in thirty minutes. "You'll have to take your regular seats down
below," she said, not looking at Ackerman, who still seemed asleep.

I began packing up my gear. The sky outside the portholes was getting
light. As I dragged my satchel up the aisle Ackerman woke up and lit a
cigarette. "Tell 'em I couldn't make it," he said. "I think I can handle
the landing from up here." He grinned

and fastened a seat belt that poked out from the depths of the couch.
"They won't miss me down there," he said. "I'll see you in Kona."

"Okay," I said. "You're not staying in Honolulu?"

He shook his head. "Just long enough to get to the bank," he said,
glancing down at his watch. "It opens at nine. I should be home for
lunch."

I stopped and shook hands with him. "Good luck," I said. "Take care of
that arm."

He smiled and reached into the pocket of his bush jacket. "Thanks, Doc,"
he said. "Here's a little something for you. It might be a long day." He
dropped a small glass bottle in my hand and pointed to the crew bathroom.
"Better do it up here," he said. "You don't want to be landing with
anything illegal."

I agreed and went quickly into the tin closet. When

I  came out I tossed the bottle back to him. "Wonderful," I said. "I feel
better already."

"That's good," he replied. "I have the feeling you're going to need all
the help you can get over here."

ADVENTURES IN THE DUMB LIFE

My friend Gene Skinner met us at the airport in

Honolulu, parking his black GTO convertible up on the sidewalk by the
baggage carousel and fending off public complaints with a distracted r^1
wave of his hand and the speedy behavior of a man with serious business on
his mind. He was pacing back and forth in front of his car, sipping from a
brown bottle of Primo beer and ignoring the oriental woman wearing a meter
maid's uniform who was trying to get his attention as he scanned the
baggage lobby.

I saw him from the top of the escalator and I knew we would have to be
quick with the luggage transfer. Skinner was so accustomed to working in
war zones that he would not see anything wrong with driving up on the
sidewalk in the middle of an angry crowd to pick up whatever he'd come for
... which was me, in this case, so I hurried toward him with a
businesslike smile on my face. "Don't worry," he was saying. "We'll be out
of here in a minute."

Most people seemed to believe him, or at least wanted to. Everything about
him suggested a person who was better left alone. The black GTO had a
menacing appearance, and Skinner looked meaner than the car. He was
wearing a white linen reef jacket with at least thirteen custom-built
pockets to fit everything from a phosphorous grenade to a waterproof pen.
His blue silk slacks were sharply creased and he wore no socks, only cheap
rubber sandals that slapped on the tile as he paced. He was a head taller
than anyone else in the airport and his eyes were hidden behind blue-black
Saigon-mirror sunglasses. The heavy, square-linked gold Bhat chain around
his neck could only have been bought in some midnight jewelry store on a
back street in Bangkok, and the watch on his wrist was a gold Rolex with a
stainless steel band. His whole presence was out of place in a crowd of
mainland tourists shuffling off an Aloha flight from San Francisco.
Skinner was not on vacation.

He saw me as I approached, and held out his hand. "Hello, Doc," he said
with a curious smile. "I thought you quit this business."

"I did," I said. "But I got bored."

"Me too," he said. "I was on my way out of town when they called me.
Somebody from the Marathon committee. They needed an official
photographer, for a thousand dollars a day."

He glanced down at a brace of new-looking Nikons on the front seat of the
GTO. "I couldn't turn them down," he said. "It's free money."

"Jesus," I said, "you're a photographer now?" He stared down at his feet
for a moment, then pivoted slowly to face me, rolling his eyes and baring
his teeth to the sun. "This is the Eighties, Doc. I'm whatever I need to
be."

Skinner was no stranger to money. Or to lying, either, for that matter.
When I knew him in Saigon he was working for the CIA, flying helicopters
for Air America and making what some people who knew him said was more
than $20,000 a week in the opium business.

I never talked about money with him and he had a visceral hatred of
journalists, but we soon became friends and I spent a lot of time during
the last weeks of the war smoking opium with him on the floor of his room
in the Continental Palace. Mr. Hee brought the pipe every afternoon around
three--even on the day his house in Cholon was hit by a rocket--and the
guests lay down in silence to receive the magic smoke.

That is still one of my clearest memories of Saigon--stretching out on the
floor with my cheek on the cool white tile and the dreamy soprano babble
of Mr. Hee in my ears as he slithered around the room with his long black
pipe and his little bunsen burner, constantly refilling the bowl and
chanting intensely in a language that none of us knew.

"Who are you working for these days?" Skinner asked. "I'm covering the
race for a medical journal," I said. "Wonderful," he said quickly. "We can
use a good medical connection. What kind of drugs are you carrying?"
"Nothing," I said. "Absolutely nothing." He shrugged, then looked up as
the carousel began moving and the bags started coming down the chute.
"Whatever you say. Doc," he said. "Let's load your stuff in the car and
get out of here before they grab me for felony menacing. I'm not in the
mood to argue with these people."

The crowd was getting restive and the oriental policewoman was writing a
ticket. I lifted the beer bottle out of his hand and took a long swallow,
then tossed my leather satchel in the back seat of his car and introduced
him to my fiancee. "You must be crazy," she said, "to park on a sidewalk
like this." That's what I get paid for," he said. "If I was sane we'd have
to carry your bags all the way to the parking lot."

She^eyed him warily as we began loading luggage. "Stand aside!" he barked
at a child who had wandered in front of the car. "Do you want to be
killed?"

The crowd fell back at that point. Whatever we were doing

was not worth getting killed for. The child disappeared as I trundled a
big aluminum suitcase off the carousel, almost dropping it as I tossed it
back to Skinner, who caught it before it could bounce and tucked it neatly
into the back seat of the convertible.

The meter maid was writing another citation, our third in ten minutes, and
I could see she was losing her grip. "I give you sixty seconds," she
screamed. "Then I have you towed away!"

He patted her affectionately on the shoulder, then got in the car and
started the engine, which came suddenly alive with a harsh metallic roar.
"You're too pretty for this kind of chickenshit work," he said, handing
her a card that he'd picked off his dashboard. "Call me at the office," he
told her. "You should be posing for naked postcards."

"What?" she yelled, as he eased the car into reverse.

The crowd parted sullenly, not happy to see us escape. "Call the police!"
somebody shouted. The meter maid was yelling into her walkie-talkie as we
moved into traffic, leaving our engine noise behind.

Skinner lifted another bottle of Primo out of a small plastic cooler on
the floor of the front seat, then steered with his knees while he jerked
off the top and lit a cigarette. "Where to. Doc?" he asked. "The Kahala
Hilton?"

"Right," I said. "How far is it?"

"Far," he said. "We'll have to stop for more beer."

I leaned back on the hot leather seat and closed my eyes. There was a
strange song about "hula hula boys" on the radio, a Warren Zevon tune:

. . . Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana . . .

I saw her leave the luau

With the one who parked the cars

And the fat one from the swimming pool

They were swaying arm in arm . . .

Skinner stomped on the gas and we shot through a sudden opening to the
inside, missing the tailgate of a slow-moving pineapple truck by six
inches and swooping through a pack of mongrel dogs on their way across the
highway. We hit gravel and the rear end started coming around, but Skinner
straightened it out. The dogs held their ground for an instant, then
scattered in panic as he leaned out of the car and smacked one of them on
the side of the head with his beer bottle. He was a big yellow

brute with scrawny flanks and the long dumb jaw of a tenth-generation cur;
and he had charged the GTO with the back-alley dumbness of a bully that
had been charging things all his life, and always seen them back off. He
came straight at the left front wheel, yapping wildly, and his eyes got
suddenly huge when he realized, too late, that Skinner was not going to
swerve. He braced all four paws on the hot asphalt, but he was charging
too fast to stop. The GTO was going about fifty in low gear. Skinner kept
his foot on the accelerator and swung the bottle like a polo mallet. I
heard a muffled smack, then a hideous yelping screech as the beast went
tumbling across the highway and under the wheels of the pineapple truck,
which crushed it.

"They're a menace," he said, tossing the neck of the bottle away. "Utterly
vicious. They'll jump right into your car at a stoplight. It's one of the
problems with driving a convertible'

My fiancee was weeping hysterically and the warped tune was still coming
out of the radio:

I could hear their ukeleles playing Down by the sea .. . She's gone with
the hula hula boys She don't care about me

Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana ...

Skinner slowed down as we approached the exit to downtown Honolulu. "Okay,
Doc," he said. "It's time to break out the drugs. I feel nervous."

Indeed, I thought. You murdering swine. "Ralph has it," I said quickly.
"He's waiting for us at the hotel. He has a whole Alka-Seltzer bottle full
of it."

He moved his foot off the brake and back to the accelerator as we passed
under a big green sign that said "Waikiki Beach 1 ½" The smile on his
face was familiar. The giddy, screw-headed smirk of a dope fiend ready to
pounce. I knew it well.

"Ralph is paranoid," I said. "We'll have to be careful with him."

"Don't worry about me," he said. "I get along fine with the English."

We were in downtown Honolulu now, cruising along the waterfront. The
streets were full of joggers fine-tuning their strides for the big race.
They ignored passing traffic, which made Skinner nervous.

"This running thing is out of control," he said. "Every rich liberal in
the Western world is into it. They run ten miles a day. It's a goddamn
religion."

"Do you run?" I asked.

He laughed. "Hell yes, I run. But never with empty hands. We're criminals.
Doc. We're not like these people and I think we're too old to learn."

"But we are professionals," I said. "And we're here to cover the race."

"Fuck the race," he said. "We'll cover it from Wilbur's front yard--get
drunk and gamble heavily on the football games."

John Wilbur, a pulling guard on the Washington Redskins team that went to
the Super Bowl in 1973, was another old friend from the white-knuckle days
of yesteryear, who had finally settled down enough to pass for a
respectable businessman in Honolulu. His house on Kahala Drive in the
high-rent section was situated right on the course for this race, about
two miles from the finish line. ... It would be a perfect headquarters for
our coverage, Skinner explained. We would catch the start downtown, then
rush out to Wilbur's to watch the games and abuse the runners as they
carne by the house, then rush back downtown in time to cover the finish.

"Good planning," I said. "This looks like my kind of story."

"Not really," he said. "You've never seen anything as dull as one of these
silly marathons . . . but it's a good excuse to get crazy."

"That's what I mean," I said. "I'm entered in this goddamn race." He shook
his head. "Forget it," he said. "Wilbur tried to pull a Rosie Ruiz a few
years ago, when he was still in top shape--he jumped into the race about a
half mile ahead of everybody at the twenty-four-mile mark, and took off
like a bastard for the finish line, running at what he figured was his
normal 880 speed. . . ." He laughed. "It was horrible," he continued.
"Nineteen people passed him in two miles. He went blind from vomiting and
had to crawl the last hundred yards." He laughed again. "These people are
fast, man. They ran right over him."

"Well," I said, "so much for that. I didn't want to enter this goddamn
thing anyway. It was Wilbur's idea."

"That figures," he said. "You want to be careful out here. Even your best
friends will lie to you. They can't help themselves."

We found Ralph slumped at the bar in the Ho-Ho Lounge, cursing the rain
and the surf and the heat and everything else in Honolulu. He had waded
out from the beach for a bit of the fine snorkeling that Wilbur had told
us about--but before he

could even get his head in the water a wave lifted him up and slammed him
savagely into a coral head, ripping a hole in his back and crushing a disc
in his spine. Skinner tried to cheer him up with a few local horror
stories, but Ralph would have none of it. His mood was ugly, and it became
even uglier when Skinner demanded cocaine.

'What are you talking about?"

Ralph screamed.

"The Dumb Dust, man,"

Skinner said. "The lash, the

crank, the white death ... I don't know, what you limeys call it. , . ."
"You mean drugs?" Ralph said finally. 'OF COURSE I MEAN DRUGS!" Skinner
screamed. "You think I came here to talk about art?" That finished that. :
Ralph limped away in a funk, and even the bartender got weird.

FIRE IN THE HUTS

We settled down at the bar and watched the rain lash the palm trees around
on the beach. The Ho Ho Lounge was open on three sides and every few
minutes a gust of warm rain blew in from the sea. t-* We were the only
customers. The Samoan bartender mixed our margaritas in silence, a rigid
smile on his face. To our left, on a rock in a small freshwater pool, two
penguins stood solemnly side by side and watched us drinking, their deep
unblinking brown eyes as curious as the bartender's.

Skinner tossed them a chunk of sashimi, which the taller one caught in
mid-air and gobbled instantly, whacking the smaller bird out of his way
with a flip of his short black wing.

"Those birds are weird," Skinner said. "I've had some real peculiar
conversations with them."

He had sulked for a while after Ralph spiked his vision of wallowing in
pure London Merck for the rest of the day, but he accepted it as just
another one of those illogical flare-ups that come with the territory.

After three or four rounds the glint was back in his voice and he was
looking at the penguins with the lazy eyes of a man who would not be bored
too much longer.

"They're a husband and wife team," he said. "The old man is the big one;
he'd peddle her ass for a handful of fish." He glanced over at me. "You
think Ralph likes penguins?"

I stared at the bird.

"Never mind," he said. "He'd probably kill the poor beast anyway. The
British will fuck anything. They're all perverts."

The bartender had his back to us, but I knew he was listening. The rigid
smile on his face was looking more and more like a grimace. How many times
had he stood calmly back there on the duckboards and listened to
respectable-looking people talk about raping the hotel penguins?

*****

On the first day of December [1778] ... he recognized that he was raising
the greatest of all the islands he had discovered: what the natives
appeared to call, and Cook wrote, "Owhyhee." By the next morning they were
close in to the spectacular shore of massive cliffs, spines of land
thrusting out into headlands, white streaks of great waterfalls tumbling
into the white surf, more rivers emerging from deep valleys. Inland there
were ravines with thundering torrents, a landscape of mixed barrenness and
fruitfulness, a pocked landscape rising slowly and then higher and higher
to the summits that were snow-capped. Snow in the tropics! Another new
discovery, another new paradox. Here, it seemed, was another rich land,
and far greater in extent than even Tahiti. Through a telescope, thousands
of natives could be seen pouring from their dwellings and their places of
work, and streaming towards the cliff tops to stare out and hold aloft
white strips of cloth as if greeting a new messiah.

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

*****

"How long is this goddamn rain going to last?" I asked.

Skinner looked out at the beach. "God knows," he said. "This is what they
call 'Kona Weather.' The winds get turned around

and the weather comes up from the south. Sometimes it lasts for nine or
ten days."

I didn't really care. It was enough, at this point, to-be away from the
snow drifts on my porch in Colorado. We called for another brace of
margaritas and relaxed to talk for a while. I kept one eye on the
bartender while Skinner told me about Hawaii.

People get edgy when the Kona weather hits. After nine or ten straight
days of high surf and no sun you can get your spleen kicked completely out
of your body on any street in Honolulu, just for honking at a Samoan.
There is a large and increasingly obvious Samoan population in Hawaii.
They are big, dangerous people with uncontrollable tempers and their
hearts are filled with hate by the sound of an automobile horn, regardless
of who's getting honked at.

Caucasians are called "haole people" by the native Hawaiians and racial
violence is a standard item in the daily newspapers and on the evening TV
news.

The stories are grisly, and a few are probably true. A current favorite in
Waikiki is the one about "A whole family from San Francisco"--a lawyer,
his wife and three children^who got raped by a gang of Koreans while
strolling on the beach at sunset, so close to the Hilton that people
sipping pineapple daiquiris on the hotel veranda heard their screams until
long after dark, but they shrugged off the noise as nothing more than the
shrieking of sea gulls in a feeding frenzy.

"Don't go near the beach after dark," Skinner warned, "unless you feel
seriously bored."

The Korean community in Honolulu is not ready, yet, for the melting pot.
They are feared by the haoles, despised by the Japs and Chinese, scorned
by Hawaiians and occasionally hunted for sport by gangs of drunken
Samoans, who consider them vermin, like wharf rats and stray dogs. . . .

"And stay away from Korean bars," Skinner added. "They're degenerate
scum--cruel, bloodthirsty little bastards. They're meaner than rats and a
hell of a lot bigger than most dogs, and they can kick the shit out of
anything that walks on two legs, except maybe a Samoan."

I shot a quick look at our bartender, shifting my weight on the stool and
planting both feet on the floor. But he was working the adding machine,
apparently deaf to Skinner's raving. What the hell? I thought. He can only
catch one of us. I picked my Zippo off the bar and casually buttoned my
wallet-pocket.

"My grandfather was Korean," I said. "Where can we meet these people?"
"What?" he said. "Meet them?"

"Don't worry," I said. "They'll know me."

"Fuck 'em," he said. "They're not people. It'll be another hundred years
before we can even think about letting Koreans mate with anything human."

I felt vaguely sick, but said nothing. The bartender was still engrossed
in his money-work.

"Forget it," Skinner said. "Let me tell you a negro story. It'll get your
mind off Koreans."

"I've heard it," I said. "The girl who got pushed off the cliff?"

"Right," he said. "It scared the shit out of everybody." He lowered his
voice and leaned closer to me. "I knew her well," he said. "She was
beautiful, a senior stewardess for Pan Am."

I nodded.

"For no reason at all," he went on. "She was just standing there on the
edge, with her boyfriend--up there on that peak where they take all the
tourists--when all of a sudden this crazy nigger just runs up behind her
and gives a big shove. Whacko! Right off the edge and a thousand feet down
to the beach." He nodded grimly. "She bounced two or three times off a
waterfall about halfway down, then she went out of sight. They never saw
her again, never found the first trace of her body."

"Why?" I wondered.

"Who knows?" he replied. "They never even put him on trial. He was
declared 'hopelessly insane.' "

"Yeah," I said. "I remember it--the black fiend who wore earphones, right?
The same guy who got busted a few weeks earlier for trying to run naked in
the Marathon?"

"Yeah, the fastest crazy nigger in the world. He ran about half the race
stark naked, before they finally caught him. The bastard was fast," he
said, smiling slightly. "It took ten cops on motorcycles to run him down
and put the net on him. He was some kind of world-class runner before he
flipped out."

"Balls," I said. "That's no excuse. These brainless murdering freaks
should be castrated."

"Absolutely," he said. "It's already happened."

"What?"

"The Samoans," he said. "The traffic jam on the freeway... . Jesus! You
never heard that story?"

I shook my head.

"Okay," he said. "This is a wonderful story about how your worst
nightmares can come true at any moment, with no warning at all."

"Good," I said. "Let's hear it. I like these stories. They speak to my
deepest fears."

"They should," he said. "Paranoia pays, over here."

"What about the Samoans?"

"The Samoans?" He stared into his drink for a moment, then looked up. "All
six of them went free. Nobody would testify. . . . Some poor bastard got
caught in one of those Sunday afternoon traffic jams on the Pali Highway
behind a pickup truck full of drunken Samoans. His car heated up like a
bomb, but there was nothing he could do--no exit, no place he could even
park it and flee. The Samoans did things like kick out his headlights and
piss all over the hood of his car, but he hung on for almost two
hours--with his doors locked and all his windows rolled up--until he
finally passed out from heat exhaustion, and fell on his horn. . . .

"The Samoans went instantly crazy," he continued. "They bashed out his
windshield with tire irons, then they dragged him out and castrated him.
Five of them held him down on the hood, while the other one sliced off his
nuts--right in the middle of the Pali Highway on a Sunday afternoon."

I was watching the bartender very carefully now. The muscles on the back
of his neck seemed to be bunching up, but I couldn't be sure. Skinner was
still slumped on his stool, not ready to do anything fast. The stairs to
the lobby were only about twenty feet away and I knew I could get there
before the brute got his hands on me.

But he was still calm. Skinner ordered another round of margaritas and
asked for the tab, which he paid with a gold American Express card.

Suddenly the phone behind the bar erupted with a burst of sharp rings. It
was my fiancee, ringing down from the room.

Sportswriters were calling, she said. Word was out that Ralph and I were
entered in the Marathon.

"Don't talk to the bastards," I warned her. "Anything you say will get us
in trouble."

"I already talked to one of them," she said. "He knocked on the door and
said he was Bob Arum."

^That's good," I said. "Bob's okay."

"It wasn't Arum," she said. "It was that geek we met in Vegas, the guy
from the New York Post."

"Lock the door," I said. "It's Marley. Tell him I'm sick. They took me off
the plane in Hilo. You don't know the name of the doctor."

"What about the race?" she asked. "What should I say?"

"It's out of the question," I said. "We're both sick. Tell them to leave
us alone. We are victims of a publicity stunt."

"You fool," she snapped. "What did you tell these people?"

"Nothing," I said. "It was Wilbur. His mouth runs like jelly."

"He called," she said. "He'll be here at nine with a limo to pick us up
for the party."

"What party?" I said, waving my hand to get Skinner's attention. "Is there
a Marathon party tonight?" I asked him.

He pulled a piece of white paper from one of the pockets in his bush
jacket. "Here's the schedule," he said. "Yeah, it's a private thing at Doc
Scaff's house. Cocktails and dinner for the runners. We're'invited."

I turned back to the phone. "What's the room number? I'll be up in a
minute. There is a party. Hang on to the limo."

"You better talk to Ralph," she said. "He's very unhappy."

"So what?" I said. "He's an artist."

"You bastard!" she said. "You'd better be nice to Ralph. He came all the
way from England---and he brought his wife and his daughter, just because
you said so."

"Don't worry," I said. "He'll get what he came for."

"What?" she screamed. "You drunken sot! Get rid of that maniac friend of
yours and go see Ralph--he's hurt!"

"Not for long," I said. "He'll be into our luggage before this thing is
over."

She hung up and I turned to the bartender. "How old are you?" I asked him.

He tensed up, but said nothing.

I smiled at him. "You probably don't remember me," I said, "but I used to
be the Governor." I offered him a Dunhill, which he declined.

"Governor of what?" he asked, dropping his hands to his sides, and turning
to face us.

Skinner quickly stood up. "Let's have a drink for old times," he said to
the bartender. "This gentleman was the Governor of American Samoa for ten
years, maybe twenty."

"I don't remember him," said the bartender. "I get a lot of people in
here."

Skinner laughed and slapped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar. "It's all
bullshit anyway," he said. "We lie for a living, but we're good people."

He leaned over the bar and shook hands with the bartender, who was happy
to see us leave. On the way to the lobby Skinner handed me a mimeographed
copy of the Marathon schedule and said he'd meet us at the party. He waved
cheerfully and signaled the bellboy to bring up his car.

Five minutes later, as I was still waiting for the elevator, I heard the
nasty cold-steel roar of the GTO outside in the driveway, then the noise
disappeared in the rain. The elevator came and I punched the button for
the top floor.

HE WAS NOT ONE OF US

Ralph was being massaged by an elderly

Japanese woman when his wife let me into the suite. His eight-year-old
daughter was staring balefully at the TV set.

"Now you mustn't upset him," Anna warned me. "He thinks his back is
broken."

Ralph was in the bedroom, stretched out on a rubber sheet and groaning
piteously as the old crone pounded his back. There was a bottle of
Glenfiddich on the sideboard and I made myself a drink. "Who was that
vicious thug you introduced me to in the lounge?" he asked.

"That was Skinner," I said. "He's our contact for the race."

"What?" he shouted. "Are you mad? He's a dope addict! Did you hear what he
said to me?"

"About what?" I asked.

"You heard him!" he yelled. "The White Death!"

"You should have offered him some," I said. "You were rude."

"That was your work," he hissed at me. "You put him up to it." He fell
back on the rubber sheet, rolling his eyes and baring his teeth at me,
wracked by a spasm of pain. "Damn you," he groaned. "Your friends are all
sick, and now you've picked up a bloody dope addict!"

"Calm down, Ralph," I said. "They're all dope addicts out here. We're
lucky to meet a good one. Skinner's an old friend. He's the official
photographer."

"Oh my God," he groaned. "I knew it would be like this."

I looked over my shoulder to see if his wife was watching, then I slapped
him hard on the temple, to bring him back to his senses. He collapsed on
the bed .. . and just at that moment

Anna came into the room with a pot of tea and some cups on a wicker tray
that she'd ordered up from room service.

The tea calmed him down and soon he was talking normally. The
twelve-thousand-mile trip from London had been a fiendish ordeal. His wife
tried to get off the plane in Anchorage and his daughter wept the whole
way. The plane was struck twice' by lightning on the descent into Honolulu
and a huge black

woman from Fiji who was sitting next to them had an epileptic seizure.

When they finally got on the ground, his luggage was lost and a cab
charged him twenty-five pounds for a ride to the hotel, where their
passports were seized by a desk clerk because he had no American money.
The manager put the rest of his pounds in the hotel safe, for security,
but allowed him to sign for snorkeling equipment at the surf shack on the
beach by the Ho Ho Lounge.

He was desperate for refuge at this point, he said, wanting only to be
alone, to relax by himself in the sea ... so he put on his flippers and
paddled out toward the reef, only to be picked up by a wave and bashed on
a jagged rock, punching a hole in his spine and leaving him ' to wash up
on the beach like a drowned animal.

"Strangers dragged me into a hut of some kind," he said. Then they shot me
full of adrenalin. By the time I could walk to the lobby I was pouring
sweat and screaming. They had to give me a sedative and bring me up in the
service elevator."

Only a desperate call to Wilbur had prevented the manager from having him
committed to the jail ward of a public hospital somewhere on the other
side of the island.

It was an ugly story. This was his first trip to the tropics, a thing he'd
been wanting to do all his life . . . and now he was going to die from it,
or at least be permanently crippled. His family was demoralized, he said.
Probably none of them would ever get back to England, not even to be
properly buried. They would die like dogs, for no good reason at all, on a
rock far out in the middle of an utterly foreign sea.

The rain lashed against the windows as we talked. There was no sign of a
break in the storm, which had been raging for many days. The weather was
worse than Wales, he said, and the pain in his back was causing him to
drink heavily. Anna cried every time he asked for more whiskey. "It's
horrible," he said. "I drank a litre of Glenfiddich last night."

Ralph is always gloomy on foreign assignments. I examined his wound
briefly and called down to the hotel gift shop for a ripe aloe plant.

"Send it up right away," I told the woman. "And we'll need something to
chop it up with--do you have any big knives? Or a meat hatchet?"

There was no answer for a few seconds, then I heard sounds of shouting and
scuffling, and a male voice came on the line. "Yes sir," he said, "were
you asking about a weapon?"

I sensed at once that I was dealing with a businessman. The voice was
Samoan, a deep croaking sound, but the instinct was universal Swiss.

"What do you have?" I asked him. "I need something to pulverize an aloe
plant."

There was a pause, then he was back on the line.

"I have a fine cutlery set--seventy-seven pieces, with a beautiful butcher
knife."

"I can get that from room service," I said. "What else do you have?"

There was another long pause. In the background I could hear a woman
yelling something about "crazy ..." and "chopping our heads off."

"You're fired," he screamed. "I'm tired of your stupid whining. It's none
of your business what they buy. Get out of here! I should have fired you a
long time ago!"

There were more sounds of brief scuffling and a babble of angry voices,
then he was back.

"I think I have what you need," he said smoothly. "It's a carved Samoan
war club. Solid ebony, with eight power points. You could pulverize a palm
tree with it."

"How much does it weigh?" I asked.

"Well . . ." he said. "Ah . . . yes, of course, could you wait just a
moment? I have a postage scale."

More noise came through the phone, a sharp rattling sound, then the voice.

"It's very heavy, sir. My scale won't handle it." He chuckled. "Yes sir,
this thing is heavy. I'd guess about ten pounds. It swings like a
sledgehammer. There's nothing in the world you couldn't kill with it."

"What's the price?" I asked.

"One-fifty."

"One-fifty?" I said. "For a stick?"

There was no reply for a moment. "No sir," he said finally. "This thing I
have in my hands is not a stick. It's a Samoan war club, perhaps three
hundred years old. It's also an extremely brutal weapon," he added. "I
could break down your door with

it."

"Never mind that," I said. "Send it up to the suite immediately, along
with the aloe plant."

"Yes sir," he said. "And how should I bill it?"

"However you want," I said. "We're extremely rich people. Money means
nothing to us."

"No problem," he said. "I'll be there in five minutes."

I hung up the phone and turned to Ralph, who was having another spasm,
writhing soundlessly on the greasy rubber sheet. "It's all taken care of,"
I said. "We'll have you on your feet in no time. My man from the gift shop
is coming up with an aloe plant and a vicious Samoan war club."

"Oh God!" he moaned. "Another one!'

"Yeah," I said, pouring myself another beaker of Glenfiddich. "He had that
sound in his voice. We'll probably

have to humor him." I smiled absently. "We'll get into your stuff sooner
or later, Ralph. Why not right now?"

"What stuff?" he shouted. "You know I don't use drugs."

"Come on, Ralph," I said. "I'm tired of your hoary lies, where

o A. "I "

IS It?

Before he could answer there was a knock on the door and a giant Samoan
bounded into the room, shouting "Aloha! Aloha!" and waving a huge negro
shinbone. "Welcome to the islands," he boomed. "My name is Maurice. Here's
your weapon."

It was an awesome thing to behold, easily capable of smashing a marble
toilet bowl.

"And here's a present." Maurice smiled, pulling a fat, ripe marijuana pod
out of his pocket. "There's plenty more where this came from."

"Anna!" Ralph screamed. "Anna! Call the manager!"

I tapped Maurice on the shoulder and led him out to the hall. "Mister
Steadman is not himself today," I told him. "He went snorkeling and broke
his back on a coral head."

Maurice nodded. "Let me know if you need any help. I have many relatives
in Honolulu. I know many doctors."

"Me too," I replied. "I am a doctor."

We shook arms again and he bounded off toward the elevator. I went back to
the bedroom and pulverized the aloe plant, ignoring Ralph's senile
complaints. His wife watched nervously as I carefully packed his wound
with green mush. "There's nothing wrong with his back," I told her. "It's
only swollen. He picked up some poison off the fire coral, but this aloe
will cure it."

Ralph passed out after the aloe treatment, but twenty minutes later he was
raving again and I persuaded him to eat a bag of valerian root, which
calmed his nerves instantly. The spasms tapered off and he was able to sit
up in bed and stare at the evening news on TV, unfazed by scenes of
hoodlums kicking chunks of flesh off a tourist on a public beach near
Pearl Harbor. His eyes were dim and his face was sickly pale. Drops of
spittle ran down his chin. His speech was slow, and when I told him about
the limo that would be picking us up in three

hours to take us to a party, he seemed happy. "It will give us a chance to
meet people," he said. "I want to make a deal with Budweiser."

I let it pass. That's the valerian root talking, I thought. Maybe I gave
him too much.

He was drooling again, and his eyes were beginning to cross. He tried to
roll a cigarette, but spilled tobacco all over the bed and I had to take
the rolling machine away from him.

He seemed not to notice. "Is it still raining?" he muttered. "I can't
stand this terrible weather. It's killing me."

"Don't worry," I said. "This is just a freak storm. All we have to do is
have a look at this race, then get over to Kona and relax. The weather's
fine over there."

He nodded, staring down through the heavy rain at a tiny red golf cart
moving quietly along the fairway of the Wailalee Country Club.

"Kona?" he said finally. "I thought we were going to Guam, for the
politics." "What?"

"Guam," he said. "Some chap in Oregon rang me up .. ." "That's Perry," I
said. "From Running." "That's right. The editor. He said we'd be off to
Guam, to have a look at the bloody election." "What?" "Next Sunday."

"No, Ralph," I said finally. "The Honolulu Marathon is next Sunday. That's
why we're here." "Marathon?"

I stared at him. His teeth were jutting out of his mouth and his eyes were
red slits in his face. The valerian root would be wearing off soon, but
maybe not soon enough. In the meantime, he might die without some kind of
stimulant.

I offered him the Glenfiddich bottle, which he eagerly grasped with both
hands, whimpering softly as he raised it to his lips. He swallowed once,
then uttered a low animal noise and vomited all over the bed.

I caught him as he was rolling off onto the floor and dragged him into the
bathroom. He crawled the last few feet on his own, then collapsed on his
knees in the shower stall.

I turned on the water, both knobs up to maximum, and closed the door so
his wife and daughter wouldn't hear his degenerate screams.

The party that night was awkward. We arrived too late for dinner and there
were "No Smoking" signs everywhere. Ralph tried to mingle, but he looked
so sick that none of the guests

would talk to him. Many were world-class runners, fanatics about persona)
health, and the sight of Ralph made them cringe. The aloe had half-cured
his back, but he still walked like a stroke victim and his physical
presence was not cheerful. He limped from room to room with his
sketchbook, still deeply confused on valerian root, until a man wearing a
silver Nike jumpsuit finally led him outside and said he should check
himself into the leper colony on Molokai.

I found him leaning against the trunk of a monkeypod tree at the far end
of the redwood deck, arguing bitterly with a stranger about the price of
marijuana.

"It's a bloody awful habit," he was saying. "The smell of it makes me
sick. I hope they put you in prison."

"You shiteating wino!" said the stranger. "It's people like you that give
marijuana a bad name!"

I stepped quickly between them, dropping my full cup of beer on the deck.
The stranger jumped back like a lizard and went into a karate crouch.
"Don't touch me!" he shouted.

"You're going to prison," I said to him. "I warned you not to sell drugs
to this man! Can't you see that he's sick?"

"What?" he screamed. Then he lunged at me, kicking savagely at my legs
with a cleated running shoe. He missed and fell toward me, off balance,
and I pushed my cigarette into his face as he staggered between us,
slapping wildly at the fire on his chin.

"Get away!" I shouted. "We don't want any drugs! Keep your goddamn drugs
to yourself!"

Others restrained the man as we hurried off. The lirno was waiting at the
top of the driveway. The driver saw us coming and started the engine,
picking us up on the roll and careening out of the driveway with a long
screech of rubber. Ralph had two spasms on the way to the hotel. The
driver became hysterical and tried to flag down an ambulance at a
stoplight on Waikiki Boulevard but I threatened to put a cigarette out on
his neck unless we went straight to the hotel.

When we got there I sent the driver back to the party, to pick up the
others. The Samoan night clerk helped me carry Ralph up to his room, then
I ate two bags of valerian root and passed out.

We spent the next few days in deep research. Neither one of us had the
vaguest idea what went on at a marathon, or why people ran in them, and I
felt we should ask a few questions and perhaps mingle a bit with the
runners.

This worked well enough, once Ralph understood that we were not going to
Guam and that Running was not a political magazine. ... By the end of the
week we were hopelessly bogged down in a maze of gibberish about
"carbo-loading," "hitting the wall," "the running divorce," "heel-toe
theories," along with so many pounds of baffling propaganda about the
Running Business that I had to buy a new Pierre Cardin seabag to carry it
all.

We hit all the prerace events, but our presence seemed to make people
nervous and we ended up doing most of our research in the Ho Ho Lounge at
the Hilton. We spent so many hours talking to runners that I finally lost
track of what it all meant and began setting people on fire.

It rained every day, but we learned to live with it ... and by midnight on
the eve of the race, we felt ready.

THE DOOMED GENERATION

We arrived at ground zero sometime around four in the morning--two hours
before starting time, but the place was already a madhouse. Half the
runners had apparently been up all night, unable to sleep and too cranked
to talk. The air was foul with a stench of human feces and Vaseline. By
five o'clock huge lines had formed in front of the bank of chemical
privies set up

by Doc Scaff and his people. Prerace diarrhea is a standard nightmare at
all marathons, and Honolulu was no different. There are a lot of good
reasons for dropping out of a race, but bad bowels is not one of them. The
idea is to come off the line with a belly full of beer and other cheap
fuel that will burn itself off very quickly. . . .

Carbo-power. No meat. Protein burns too slow for these people. They want
the starch. Their stomachs are churning like rat-bombs and their brains
are full of fear.

Will they finish? That is the question. They want that "Finishers"
T-shirt. Winning is out of the question for all but a quiet handful: Frank
Shorter, Dean Matthews, Duncan MacDonald, Jon Sinclair. . . . These were
the ones with the low numbers on their shirts: 4, 11, 16, and they would
be the first off the line.

The others, the Runners--people wearing four-digit numbers-- were lined up
in ranks behind the Racers, and it would take them a while to get started.
Carl Hatfield was halfway to Diamond Head before the big number people
even tossed their Vaseline bottles and started moving, and they knew, even
then, that not one of them would catch a glimpse of the winner until long
after the race was over. Maybe get his autograph at the banquet. . . .

We are talking about two very distinct groups here, two entirely different
marathons. The Racers would all be finished and half drunk by 9:30 in the
morning, or just about the time the Runners would be humping and
staggering past Wilbur's house at the foot of "Heartbreak Hill."

At 5:55 we jumped on the tailgate of Don Kardong's KKUA radio press van,
the best seats in the house, and moved out in

front of the pack at exactly 11.5 miles per hour, or somewhere around the
middle of second gear. The plan was to drop us off at Wilbur's house and
then pick us up again on the way back.

Some freak with four numbers on his chest came off the line like a hyena
on speed and almost caught up with our van and the two dozen motorcycle
cops assigned to run interference . . . but he faded quickly.

We jumped off the radio van at Wilbur's and immediately set up a full
wet-bar and Command Center next to the curb and for the next few minutes
we just stood there in the rain and heaped every conceivable kind of
verbal abuse on the Runners coming up.

"You're doomed, man, you'll never make it."

"Hey, fat boy, how about a beer?"

"Run, you silly bastard."

"Lift those legs."

"Eat shit and die," was Skinner's favorite.

One burly runner in the front ranks snarled back at him, "I'll see you on
the way back."

"No, you won't. You'll never make it back. You won't even finish! You'll
collapse."

It was a rare kind of freedom to belch any kind of cruel and brutal insult
that came to mind because the idea of anybody stopping to argue was out of
the question. Here was this gang of degenerates hunkered down by the side
of the racecourse with TV sets, beach umbrellas, cases of beer and
whiskey, loud music and wild women, smoking cigarettes.

It was raining--a light warm rain, but steady enough to keep the streets
wet, so we could stand on the curb and hear every footfall on the pavement
as the runners came by.

The front-runners were about thirty seconds behind us when we jumped off
the still-moving radio van, and the sound of their shoes on the wet
asphalt was not much louder than the rain. There was no sound of hard
rubber soles pounding and slapping on the street. That noise came later,
when the Racers had passed and the first wave of Runners appeared.

The Racers run smoothly, with a fine-tuned stride like a Wankel rotary
engine. No wasted energy, no fighting the street or bouncing along like a
jogger. These people flow, and they flow very fast.

The Runners are different. Very few of them flow, and not many run fast.
And the slower they are, the more noise they make. By the time the
four-digit numbers came by, the sound of the race was disturbingly loud
and disorganized. The smooth rolling hiss of the Racers had degenerated
into a hell broth of slapping and pounding feet.

We followed the race by radio for the next hour or so. It was

raining too hard to stand out by the curb, so we settled down in the
living room to watch football on TV and eat the big breakfast that Carol
Wilbur had fixed "for the drunkards" before leaving at four in the morning
to run in the Marathon. (She finished impressively, around 3:50.) It was
just before eight when we got a call from Kardong in the radio van to be
out on the curb for a rolling pickup on the way to the finish line.

Duncan MacDonald, a local boy and previous two-time winner, had taken
command of the race somewhere around the 15-mile mark and was so far ahead
that the only way he could lose this race would be by falling down--which
was not likely, despite his maverick reputation and good-natured disdain
for traditional training habits. Even drunk, he was a world-class racer,
and a hard man for anybody to catch once he got out in front.

There was nobody near him when he passed the 24-mile mark in front of
Wilbur's house, and we rode the final two miles to the finish line on the
tailgate of the radio van, about 10 yards ahead of him , .. and when he
came down the long hill from Diamond Head, surrounded by motorcycle cops
and moving like Secretariat in the stretch at Churchill Downs, he looked
about 10 feet tail.

"Jesus Christ," Skinner muttered. "Look at that bastard run."

Even Ralph was impressed. "This is beautiful," he said quietly, "this man
is an athlete."

Which was true. It was like watching Magic Johnson run the fast break or
Walter Payton turning the corner. A Racer in full stride is an elegant
thing to see. And for the first time all week, the Running Business made
sense to me. It was hard to imagine anything catching Duncan MacDonald at
that point, and he was not even breathing hard.

We hung around the finish line for a while to watch the Racers coming in,
then we went back to Wilbur's to have a look at the Runners. They
straggled by, more dead than alive, for the rest of the morning and into
the afternoon. The last of the finishers came in a few minutes after six,
just in time to catch the sunset and a round of applause from the few
rickshaw drivers still loitering in the park by the finish line.

Marathon running, like golf, is a game for players, not winners. That is
why Wilson sells golf clubs, and Nike sells running shoes. The Eighties
will not be a healthy decade for games designed only for winners--except
at the very pinnacle of professional sport; like the Super Bowl, or the
Heavyweight Championship of the World. The rest of us will have to adjust
to this notion, or go mad from losing. Some people will argue, but not
many. The concept of victory through defeat has already taken root, and a
lot of people say it makes sense. The Honolulu Marathon was a showcase
example of the New Ethic. The main prize in

this race was a gray T-shirt for every one of the four thousand
"Finishers." That was the test, and the only ones who failed were those
who dropped out.

There was no special shirt for the winner, who finished so far ahead of
the others that only a handful of them ever saw him until the race was
long over . , . and not one of them was close enough to MacDonald, in
those last two miles before the finish, to see how a real winner runs.

The other five or six or even seven or eight thousand entrants were
running for their own reasons .. . and this is the angle we need; the
raison d'etre as it were.... Why do those buggers run? Why do they punish
themselves so brutally, for no prize at all? What kind of sick instinct
would cause eight thousand supposedly smart people to get up at four in
the morning and stagger at high speed through the streets of Waikiki for
26 ball-busting miles in a race that less than a dozen of them have the
slightest chance of winning?

These are the kind of questions that can make life interesting for an
all-expense-paid weekend at the best hotel in Honolulu. But that weekend
is over now, and we have moved our base to Kona, 150 miles downwind--the
"gold coast" of Hawaii, where anybody even half hooked in the local real
estate market will tell you that life is better and bigger and lazier and
.. . yes . -. even richer in every way than on any one of the other
islands in this harsh little maze of volcanic zits out here in the middle

of the Pacific Ocean, 5,000 miles from anywhere at all.

There's no sane reason at all for these runners. Only a fool would try to
explain why four thousand Japanese ran at top speed past the USS Arizona,
sunken memorial in the middle of Pearl Harbor, along with another four or
five thousand certified American liberals cranked up on beer and spaghetti
and all taking the whole thing so seriously that only one in two thousand
could even smile at the idea of a 26-mile race featuring four thousand
Japanese that begins and ends within a stone's throw of Pearl Harbor on
the morning of December 7, 1980. . . .

Thirty-nine years later. What are these people celebrating? And why on
this bloodstained anniversary?

It was a weird gig in Honolulu, and it is even weirder now. We are
talking, here, about a thing with more weight than we know. What looked
like a paid vacation in Hawaii has turned into a nightmare--and at least
one person has suggested that we may be looking at the Last Refuge of the
Liberal Mind, or at least the Last Thing that Works.

Run for your life, sport, because that's all you have left. The same
people who burned their draft cards in the Sixties and got lost in the
Seventies are now into running. When politics failed and personal
relationships proved unmanageable; after McGovern went down and Nixon
exploded right in front of our eyes .. . after Ted Kennedy got Stassenized
and Jimmy Carter put the fork to everybody who ever believed anything he
said about anything at all, and after the nation turned en masse to the
atavistic wisdom of Ronald Reagan.

Well, these are, after all, the Eighties and the time has finally come to
see who has teeth, and who doesn't. . . . Which may or may not account for
the odd spectacle of two generations of political activists and social
anarchists finally turning--twenty years later--into runners.

Why is this?

That is what we came out here to examine. Ralph came all the way from
London--with his wife and eight-year-old daughter-- to grapple with this
odd question that I told him was vital but which in fact might mean
nothing at all.

Why not come to Aspen and have some fun with the New Dumb?

Or why not skewer Hollywood? If only to get even with that scum. ... Or
even back to Washington, for the last act of "Bedtime for Bonzo"?

Why did we come all the way out here to what used to be called "the
Sandwich Islands" to confront some half-wit spectacle like eight thousand
rich people torturing themselves in the streets of Honolulu and calling it
sport?

Well . , . there is a reason; or at least there was, when we agreed to do
this thing.

The Fata Morgana.

Yes, that was the reason--some wild and elegant hallucination in the sky.
We had both retired from journalism; then years

of working harder and harder for less and less money can make a man kinky.
Once you understand that you can make more money by simply answering your
telephone once a week than by churning out gibberish for the public prints
at a pace keyed to something like three hours of sleep a night for thirty,
sixty,

or even eighty-eight hours in a stretch, it is hard to get up for the idea
of going back into hock to American Express and Master Charge for just
another low-rent look at what's happening.

Journalism is a Ticket to Ride, to get personally involved in the same
news other people watch on TV-- which is nice, but it won't pay the rent,
and people who can't pay their rent in the Eighties are going to be in
trouble. We are into a very nasty decade, a brutal Darwinian crunch that
will not be a happy time for free-lancers.

Indeed. The time has come to write books--or even movies, for those who
can keep a straight face. Because there is money in these things; and
there is no money in journalism.

But there is action, and action is an easy thing to get hooked on. It is a
nice thing to know that you can pick up a phone and be off to anywhere in
the world that interests you--on twenty-four hours notice, and especially
on somebody else's tab. That is what you miss: not the money, but the
action--and that is why I finally drilled Ralph out of his castle in Kent
for a trip to Hawaii and a look at this strange new phenomenon called
"running." There was no good reason for it; I just felt it was time to get
out in the world . . . get angry and tune the instruments ... go to Hawaii
for Christmas.

V

WHY DO THEY LIE TO US?

We fled Honolulu the next day, getting out just ahead of a storm that
closed the airport and cancelled the surfing tournaments on the north
shore. Ralph was half crazy from the pain in his back and the weather, but
Wilbur assured him that Kona was sunsoaked and placid.

The houses were all set and the agent, Mr. Heem, would meet us at the
airport. Uncle John would be over to see us in a few days, with the
family. Meanwhile take the sun and do some diving out in front of the
house, where the sea would be calm as a lake.

Indeed. I was definitely ready for it--and even Ralph was excited. The
constant rain in Honolulu had broken his spirit, and the wound on his
spine was not healing. "You look sick," I said to him as he staggered into
the airport with a huge IBM Selectric that he'd stolen from the hotel.

"I am sick," he shouted. "My whole body is rotting. Thank God we're going
to Kona. I must rest. I must see the sun." "Don't worry, Ralph," I said.
"Wilbur's taken care of everything." Which I believed at the time. He had
no reason to lie, or at least none I could see at the time.

*****

It was ... as if the ships had by chance arrived at some culmination in
the lives of this community, a climax that would affect their destiny.
Polynesian excitement was one thing, and they were familiar with that. In
this bay the whole population gave the impression of being on the brink of
mass madness. . . .

The canoes directed Cook's boat to Kealakekua village on the eastern arm
of the bay. As soon as they were ashore Cook, King and Bayly were
conscious of the silence by contrast with the bedlam surrounding the
ships. They were conscious, too, that the atmosphere was quite different
from any previous ceremony, as if they were at the same time venerated yet
restricted: half god, half captive. Kanina took Cook firmly by the hand
when they landed on the volcanic rock shore and led him away as if he were
his prisoner. A native walked ahead of them incanting a dirge which was
repeated again and again. The word Lono was predominant, and when the
natives who had come out to greet them heard it they prostrated
themselves.

The party proceeded along the length of a wall of lava rocks, through the
village, towards the moral, here called a heiau. It was huge and
impressive, a rectangular black block set among the waving coconut trees
and about 20 by 40 yards in size, surrounded by a fence in a state of
disrepair on which were set 20 human skulls. Crudely carved grotesque
wooden images grinning down at them from poles added to the threatening
aspect of this holy place, which also featured an elaborate but dangerous
looking scaffold with 12 more images set in a semi-circle, and a high
altar upon which lay some sacrificial offerings, among them a lot of fruit
and a huge half decayed hog.

Four natives had now appeared, ceremonially dressed and bearing wands
tipped with dogs' hair, and chanting the word Lono.*

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

*Or Orono, as Hough actually makes it out to be. "Orono" has been changed
to Lono throughout.

*****

But he did. Almost everything he said was a lie. Our lives were about to
become a living hell. Our Christmas would be a nightmare. Fear and
loneliness would govern our lives, which would wander out of control. And
we would all feel sicker and sicker every day. There would be no relief,
no laughter; only craziness, despair and confusion.

Mr. Heem, the realtor, was waiting when we arrived at Kailua-Kona Airport,
a palmy little oasis on the edge of the sea, about 10 miles out of town.
The sun was getting low and there were puddles of water on the runway, but
Mr. Heem assured us the weather was fine. "We'll sometimes get a little
shower in the late afternoon," he said. "But I think you'll find it
refreshing."

There was not enough room in his car for all our luggage, so I rode into
town with a local fisherman called Captain Steve, who said he lived right
up the beach from us. We loaded the luggage into his El Camino pickup and
I sent the others on with Mr. Heem.

Ralph was agitated about leaving me alone with a stranger. "I can see it
in his eyes," he said. "He's a dope addict. It's no accident that he was
sitting here like a troll when we got off the plane."

"Ridiculous," I said. "He's picking up his girl friend. People are
friendly over here, Ralph. It's not like Honolulu!"

"Oh God!" he moaned. "You're lying again. They're everywhere,

like pods--and you're one of them!"

"That's right," I said. "And so is this man Heem. He slipped me a package
the minute we got off the plane."

He stared at me, then quickly pulled his daughter to his side. "It's
horrible," he muttered. "Worse than perverts."

The highway from the airport into town was one of the ugliest stretches of
road I'd ever seen in my life. The whole landscape was a desert of hostile
black rocks, mile after mile of raw moonscape and ominous low-lying
clouds. Captain Steve said we were crossing an old lava flow, one of the
last eruptions from the 14,000-foot hump of Mauna Kea to our left,
somewhere up in the fog. Far down to the right a thin line of coconut
palms marked the new western edge of America, a lonely-looking wall of
jagged black lava cliffs looking out on the white-capped Pacific. We were
2,500 miles west of the Seal Rock Inn, halfway to China, and the first
thing I saw on the outskirts was a Texaco station, then a McDonald's
hamburger stand.

Captain Steve seemed uneasy with my description of the estate he was
taking me to. When I described the brace of elegant Japanese-style beach
houses looking out on a black marble pool and a thick green lawn rolling
down to a placid bay, he shook his head sadly and changed the subject.
"We'll go out on my boat for some serious marlin fishing," he said.

"I've never caught a fish in my life," I said. "My temperament is wrong
for it."

"You'll catch fish in Kona," he assured me as we rounded a corner into
downtown Kailua, a crowded commercial district on the rim of the bay with
half-naked people running back and forth through traffic like sand crabs.

We slowed to a crawl, trying to avoid pedestrians, but as we passed the
Kona Inn a potbellied man with white hair carrying a beer bottle in each
hand came running out of the driveway yelling, "You dirty bitch! I'll
break your neck!" and crashed against the car at full speed, smacking my
arm against the door. He fell back on the street and I tried to open the
car door to get out and stomp on him, but my arm was completely numb. I
couldn't lift it, or even move my fingers.

I was still in shock when we stopped at a red light and I noticed what
appeared to be a cluster of garish-looking prostitutes standing in the
shadows of a banyan tree on the sidewalk. Suddenly there was a woman
leaning in my window, yelling gibberish at Captain Steve. She was trying
to reach in and get

hold of him, but my arm was dead and I couldn't roll up the window. When
she reached across me again I grabbed her hand and jammed my lit cigarette
into her palm. The light changed and Captain Steve sped away, leaving the
whore screeching on her knees in the middle of the intersection. "Good
work," he said to me. "That guy used to work for me. He was a first-class
mechanic." "What?" I said. "That whore?"

"That was no whore," he said. "That was Hilo Bob, a shameless
transvestite. He hangs out on that corner every night, with all those
other freaks. They're all transvestites."

I wondered if Mr. Heem had brought Ralph and his family along this same
scenic route. I had a vision of him struggling desperately with a gang of
transvestites in the middle of a traffic jam, not knowing what it meant.
Wild whores with crude painted faces, 'bellowing in deep voices and
shaking bags of dope in his face, demanding American money.

We were stuck in this place for at least a month, and the rent was $1,000
a week--half in advance, which we'd already paid Mr. Heem.

"It's a bad situation," Captain Steve was saying, as we picked up speed on
the way out of town. "Those freaks have taken over a main intersection and
the cops can't do anything about it." He swerved suddenly to avoid a
pear-shaped jogger on the shoulder of the highway. "Hilo Bob goes crazy
every time he sees my car," he said. "I fired him after he had a
sex-change operation, so he got a lawyer and sued me for mental anguish.
He wants a half-million dollars."

"Jesus," I said, still rubbing my wounded arm. "A gang of vicious bull
fruits, harassing the traffic on main street."

"Yeah," he went on. "I made a real effort with Bob, but he got too weird
for the clients. I'd get to the boat in the morning with a terrible
hangover and find him asleep on the ice chest with his hair dyed orange
and lipstick smeared all over his face. He got real bitchy and strange
after he had his operation, and he started drinking a lot. I never knew
what to expect^One morning he showed up with the ass cut out of his
Levi's, but I didn't notice it until we were out of the harbor and I let
him take the helm. I had a family of Japs on board, and they all went
crazy at once. The grandfather was a famous fisherman, about ninety years
old, and they'd brought him all the way to Kona

to catch his last marlin. I was up in the tower, still half-sick

and asleep, when I heard a lot of screaming down in the cabin.

It sounded like Bob was being killed. I came down the ladder

with a loaded forty-five in my hand, and got. hit in .the face

with a spear handle by an old Woman about four feet tall.

It knocked me out cold. By the time I woke up the boat

was running in circles and Bob was over the side,

fouled in the outrigger lines. He had two hooks in

his back and the water was full of blood, but they

wouldn't' let me stop to pull him back aboard.

The old man wanted me to shoot him in the

water. I had to give, them five hundred

dollars in cash before they, let me pick

Bob up, then they stabbed him three

or four times on the way back

to port." He laughed bitterly. "It was the worst experience I've ever had
at sea. They reported me to the Coast Guard and I almost lost my captain's
license. The story was on the front page of the newspaper. They charged me
with sexual assault and I had to defend myself at a public hearing." He
laughed again. "Jesus Christ! How do you explain a thing like that? The
first mate walking around the deck with the seat cut out of his pants."

I said nothing. The story made me uncomfortable. What kind of place had we
come to? I wondered. And what if Ralph wanted to go fishing? Captain Steve
seemed okay, but the stories he told were eerie. They ran counter to most
notions of modern-day sport fishing. Many clients ate only cocaine for
lunch, he said; others went crazy on beer and wanted to fight, on days
when the fish weren't biting. No strikes before noon put bad pressure on
the captain. For five hundred dollars a day, the clients wanted big fish,
and a day with no strikes at all could

flare up in mutiny on the long ride back to the harbor at sunset. "You
never know," he said. "I've had people try to put a gaffing hook into me,
with no warning at all. That's why I carry the forty-five. There's no
point calling the cops when you're twenty miles out to sea. They can't
help you out there." He glanced in the direction of the surf, booming up
on the rocks about a hundred yards to our right. The ocean was out there,
I knew, but the sun had gone down and all I could see was blackness. The
nearest landfall in that direction was Tahiti, 2,600 miles due south.

It was raining now, and he turned on the windshield wipers. We were
cruising slowly along in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The highway was lined
on both sides with what appeared to be unfinished apartment buildings, new
condominiums and raw construction sites littered with bulldozers and
cranes. The roadside was crowded with

long-haired thugs carrying surfboards, paying no attention to traffic.
Captain Steve was getting edgy, but he said we were almost there.

"It's one of these hidden driveways," he muttered, slowing down to examine
the numbers on a row of tin mailboxes.

"Impossible," I said. "They told me it was far out at the end of a narrow
country road."

He laughed, then suddenly hit the brakes and swung right through a narrow
slit in the shrubbery beside the road. "This is it," he said, jamming the
brakes again to keep from running up on the back of Mr. Heem's car. It was
parked with all the doors open in a cluster of cheap wooden shacks about
15 feet off the highway. There was nobody in sight, and the rain was
getting dense. We quickly loaded the baggage out of the El Camino and into
the nearest shack, a barren little box with only two cots and a Salvation
Army couch for furniture. The sliding glass doors looked out on the sea,
like they said, but we were afraid to open them, for fear of the booming
surf. Huge

waves crashed down on the black rocks in front of the porch. White foam
lashed the glass and water ran into the living room, where the walls were
alive with cockroaches.

The storms continued all week: murky sun in the morning, rain in the
afternoon and terrible surf all night. We couldn't even swim in the pool,
much less do any diving. Captain Steve was becoming more and more frantic
about our inability to get in the water, or even go near it. We conferred
each day on the phone, checking the weather reports and hoping for a
break.

The problem, he explained, was an off-shore storm somewhere out in the
Pacific--maybe a hurricane on Guam, or something worse down south around
Tahiti, In any case, something we couldn't control or even locate was
sending big rollers across the ocean from some faraway place. Hawaii is so
far out in the middle of nothing that a mild squall in the straits of
Malacca, 3,000 miles away, can turn a six-inch ripple into a sixteen-foot
wave by the time it hits Kona. There is no other place in the world that
so consistently bears the brunt of other people's weather.

The Kona Coast is on the leeward side of the Big Island, protected by the
towering humps of two 14,000-foot volcanoes from the prevailing northeast
winds. The whole east coast of the island is a jagged wasteland of ferns
and black boulders, lashed by the same Arctic winds that make the north
coast of Oahu a surfer's paradise.

But the same wave that picks up a surfboard can also pick up a boat and
send it rocketing toward the beach at terrible speeds. Nobody who has ever
taken that ride wants to do it again. "There's no way you can ride it
out," Captain Steve told me. "If you try to keep it straight you'll get
smashed on the rocks like some kind of flying egg--and if you try to turn
out of the wave, the boat will broach and start rolling. Either way,
you're doomed."

*************

We hear all our lives about the "gentle, stormless Pacific," and about the
"smooth and delightful route to the Sandwich Islands," and about the
"steady blowing trades," that never vary, never change, never "chop
around," and all the days of our boyhood we read how that infatuated old
ass, Balboa, looked out from the top of a high rock upon a broad sea as
calm and peaceful as a sylvan lake, and went into an ecstasy of delight,
like any other greaser over any other trifle, and shouted in his foreign
tongue and waved his country's banner, and named his great discovery
"Pacific"-- thus uttering a lie which will go on deceiving generation
after generation of students while the old ocean lasts. If I had been
there, with my experience, I would have said to this man Balboa, "Now, if
you think you have made a sufficient display of yourself, cavorting around
on this conspicuous rock, you had better fold up your old rag and get back
into the woods again, because you have jumped into a conclusion, and
christened this sleeping boy-baby with a girl's name, without stopping to
inquire into the sex of it."

From all that I can discover, if this foreign person had named this ocean
the "Four Months Pacific," he should have come nearer the mark. My
information is to the effect that the summer months give fine weather,
smooth seas, and steady winds, with a month and a few days good weather at
the far end of spring and the beginning of autumn and that the other seven
or eight months of the year one can calculate pretty regularly on head
winds and stern winds, and winds on the quarter, and winds several points
aloft the beam, and winds that blow straight up from the bottom, and still
other winds that come so straight down from above that the
fore-stuns'1-spanker-jib-boom makes a hole through them as clean as a
telescope. And the sea rolls and leaps and chops and surges "thortships"
and up and down and fore-and-aft by turns, when the gales are blowing; and
when they die out, the old nor'west swell comes in and takes a hand, and
stands watch, and keeps up the marine earthquake until the winds are
rested and ready to make trouble again.

In a word, the Pacific is "rough" for seven or eight months in the
year--not stormy, understand me; not what one could just call stormy, but
contrary, baffling, and very "rough."

Therefore, if that Balboa-constrictor had constructed a name for it that
had "Wild" or "Untamed" to it, there would have been a majority of two
months in the year in favor and in support of it.

Mark Twain Letters from Hawaii

*****************

It happened to a friend of his once, he said. "He was coming in with a
party of tourists one afternoon. They were in an ugly mood because nobody
had caught a fish, so he was keeping an eye on them'and talking to his
wife on the radio at the same time, not watching the waves--when all of a
sudden he realized he was ten feet out of the water and coming into the
harbor so fast that all he could do was jump. The boat kept on going and
he said he could hear those poor bastards screaming all the way into the
rocks." He smiled ruefully. "One guy was down below changing his pants
when the boat finally flipped; he was trapped in an air pocket under the
boat for two hours before we could get him out. We had to come up
underneath him with tanks, then get hold of his legs and drag him down
about eighteen  feet before we could take him up." He shook his head, no
longer smiling. "Jesus," he said, "I hope I never have to see a thing like
that again. He was stark naked and completely hysterical by the time we
got him to the dock. It was a terrible scene. The whole crowd was laughing
at him, and that made him even crazier. One of the guys who tried to help
him out of the dinghy still has teeth marks all over his arm. Then he
locked himself in a car and we had to break a window to get him out.

"The boat was a total loss," he added. "Probably fifty or sixty thousand
dollars. What was left of it finally sank and blocked the entrance to the
harbor for five days."

Waves like that are rare on the Kona Coast, where the waters

are usually more placid than anywhere else in the islands--

except when the weather turns around, as they say, and the

winds blow in from the west.

Mark Twain did not lie--at least not about the Pacific Ocean

in winter. The Kona Coast in December is as close to hell on

earth as a half-bright mammal can get--and this is the leeward

side of the "Big Island": this is the calm side. God only knows what
happens over

there on the windward side, around

Hilo. .. . That is the "wet coast,"

they say, and even real estate agents

will warn you against going over

there, for any reason at all. But they will not warn

you about Kona ... so

that will have to be my job; for as long as the grass is green and the
rivers flow to the sea. The Kona Coast of Hawaii might be

a nice place to visit for a few hours on the hottest day in July--but not
even fish will come near this place in the winter; if the surf doesn't
kill you, the Surge will, and anybody who tries to tell you anything
different should have his teeth gouged out with a chisel.

H.S.T.: I'm calling about a wave warning I just heard on the radio. We're
visiting out here, tourists in fact.

COP: Yeah--where you staying at?

H.S.T.: I'm out past Magic Sands.

COP: Right on the beach?

H.S.T.: Right smack on the beach.

COP: Okay--we are expecting high surf about four o'clock this morning,

H.S.T.: What does this mean to me? We've had some pretty high surf out
here.

COP: Yeah, well, it means it's going to possibly crest at seventeen feet
this morning at about four.

H.S.T.: Seventeen feet? Is that measuring behind the wave? That's actually
--ah--that's a real high sea, isn't it?

COP: Right. Something about a storm to the north of the islands or
whatever. However, right now, they're only advising. But if there's any
loose gear, it should be secured.

H.S.T.: 7s this going to pick rocks out of the ocean and put them into my
bedroom?

COP: No, not quite that bad we hope. Ah--of course if it worsens, if the
situation worsens, the CD, the Civil Defense will become involved.

H.S.T.: Well, if it's four o'clock in the morning most of us will be
asleep, hopefully. How will we know when it gets serious?

COP: Well, we'll probably use some police cars or the fire department with
loudspeakers and go down Alii Drive recommending evacuation. But right now
it's just an advisory.

H.S.T.: This is that same storm from the North? And it's going to get
worse?

COP: At four this morning the high tides will be at their worst.

H.S.T.: The worst.

COP: Right. But right now it appears fairly calm.

H.S.T.: It does. I was just downtown --it looked very calm to me.

COP: The waves in Kailua Bay are running five feet; Kaheo Bay, nothing--no
wave action at all.

H.S.T.: What was the size of the waves we had about two weeks ago? That's
when we had some trouble up here. They came up to the porch.

COP: I  really don't know, I wasn't working at that time, apparently,
because I don't recall it.

H.S.T.: There was no alert. It wasn't that high. Maybe eight or ten
feet--I was fust trying to compare. Well, we'll see, won't we?

COP: Yeah, as I said, right now they're just advising if you have any gear
on your back porch or whatever, make sure it's secure.

H.S.T.: (laughs) Secure-----

COP: And they will take steps to alert

the populace near the beach.

H.S.T.: Steps? What kind of steps?

Phone calls? Sirens? How will we

know? Like I said, we'll probably be

asleep.

COP: Well, as I said, they'll either

use the loudspeakers on the police

cars and fire department vehicles or

they'll be using--(pause)-- they'll be

using the Civil Defense siren--which

will wake you up, guaranteed.

H.S.T.: Okay, but we won't be taken

out of our beds by a tsunami?

COP: No tsunami. Don't worry about

that.

H.S.T.: Okay, thank you.

COP: You're welcome. Bye.

TITS LIKE ORANGE FIREBALLS

All work ceased on ray side of the compound as the

holiday season approached. I hunkered down for the pro football playoffs,
betting heavily with Wilbur on the telephone and squandering away my
winnings on fireworks. The Christmas season, in Hawaii, is also the time
of the annual Feast of Lono, the god of excess and abundance. The
missionaries may have taught the natives to love Jesus, but deep in their
pagan hearts they don't really like him: Jesus is too stiff for these
people. He had no sense of humor. The ranking gods and goddesses of the
old Hawaiian culture are mainly distinguished by their power, not their
purity, and they are honored for their vices as well as their awesome
array of virtues. They are not intrinsically different from the people
themselves--just bigger and bolder and better in every way.

The two favorites are Lono and Pele, the randy Volcano goddess. When Pele
had a party, everybody came; she was a lusty long-haired beauty who danced
naked on molten lava with a gourd of gin in each hand, and anybody who
didn't like it was instantly killed. Pele had her problems--usually with
wrong-headed lovers, and occasionally with whole armies--but in the end
she always prevailed. And she still lives, they say, in her cave
underneath a volcano on Mt. Kiluea and occasionally comes out to wander
around the island in any form she chooses-- sometimes as a beautiful young
girl on a magic surfboard, sometimes a jaded harlot sitting alone at the
bar of the Volcano House; but usually--for some reason the legends have
never made clear--in the form of a wizened old woman who hitchhikes around
the island with a pint of gin in her kitbag.

Whether Pele and Lono ever got together is a question still shrouded in
mystery, but as a gambler I would have to bet on it. There is not enough
room on these islands for the two mo.st powerful deities in Hawaiian
history to roam around for 1,000 years without coming to grips with each
other.

King Lono, ruler of all the islands in a time long before the Hawaiians
had a written language, was not made in the same mold as Jesus, although
he seems to have had the same basically decent instincts. He was a wise
ruler and his reign is remembered in legend as a time of peace, happiness
and great abundance in the kingdom--the Good Old Days, as it were, before
the white man came--which may have had something to do with his elevation
to the status of a god in the wake of his disappearance. Lono was also a
chronic brawler with an ungovernable temper.

a keen eye for the naked side of life and a taste for strong drink at all
times. This side of his nature, although widely admired by his subjects,
kept him in constant trouble at home. His wife, the lovely Queen Kaikilani
Alii, had a nasty temper of her own, and the peace of the royal household
was frequently shattered by monumental arguments.

It was during one of these spats that King Lono belted his queen across
the hut so violently, at least once, that he accidentally killed her.
Kaikilani's death plunged him into a fit of grief so profound that he
abandoned his royal duties and took to wandering around the islands,
staging a series of boxing and wrestling matches in which he took on all
comers. But he soon tired of this and retired undefeated, they say,
sometime around the end of the eighth or ninth century. Still bored and
distraught, he then took off in a magic canoe for a tour of "foreign
lands"--from whence he would return, he promised, as soon as the time was
right.

The natives have been waiting for this moment ever since, handing his
promise down from one generation to another and faithfully celebrating the
memory of their long-lost God/King at the end of each year with a two-week
frenzy of wild parties and industrial-strength fireworks. The missionaries
did everything in their power to wean the natives away from their faith in
what amounted to a kind of long-overdue alter-Christ, and modern
politicians have been trying for years to curtail or even ban the annual
orgy of fireworks during the Christmas season, but so far nothing has
worked.

THERE ARE NO

RULES

We learned these things--or at least a few of them--

from Captain Steve, the local charter fisherman ^^^ who befriended us when
we arrived at the Kailua-Kona Airport and subsequently became our main man
on the island. Captain Steve had a fully-rigged fishing boat and was
determined to take us out and catch a marlin--a gesture of fine
hospitality that promised to make our stay in Kona even richer and more
exciting than we'd known it was going to he, all along. Wilbur also had a
fishing trip lined up for us; and Stan Dzura, an old friend from Colorado,
had a boat that he'd offered to let us use any time we wanted.

It had seemed up to that point, that we were definitely in good shape, and
as the winter solstice approached I felt optimistic enough to invite my
son, Juan, over to Hawaii for a week or so of the finest water sport. The
Kona Coast is one of the world's best game-fishing grounds, regarded by
serious anglers as the equal of anything to be found in the Bahamas or the
Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

Both Ralph and I were pleased at our unexpected run of high luck. In
addition to having our own pool and a private beach right in front of the
compound for swimming and skin diving, now we also had our own boats to
get out on the ocean and stalk the mighty marlin. Money was no problem,
Captain Steve explained. Charter boats in Kona normally go for $500 a day,
but for us that fee would be waived; all we had to do was bring our own
food and drink. . . .

Indeed. Just the sight of these words on paper sends a shudder up my spine
even now, long after we finally escaped and moved on to other ordeals. We
will get to the details later, but the main bearings of the story and all
we need to know for now are these: 1) Early in December we moved into a
kind of seaside estate containing a pool and three wooden houses--one for
the caretaker, one for Ralph and his family, and another for me, Laila and
Juan. 2) Captain Steve, who lived not far up the beach from us, became
more and more obsessed with getting us out on the sea to catch fish. 3) In
December of that year the Kona Coast was lashed by a series of terrible
storms that made our lives a living hell. And 4) our social behavior
turned so ugly and rude that we were shunned by the natives and eventually
turned to excessive use of fireworks, whiskey and bad craziness in the
compound.

The Kona fishing fleet stayed safely in port during this period, leaving
Captain Steve and the other seafaring types with a lot of time on their
hands--which most of them spent on barstools,  bitching endlessly about
the weather, the dearth of paying tourists on the island and the first bad
signs of what some of them saw as the imminent collapse of the local real
estate market. Hawaii had been the only state in the Union that didn't
vote for Reagan, so there were a lot of people hanging idly around the
bars who kept saying "I told you so" to anybody who would listen.

This was the situation we found ourselves mired in, and the only
escape--for me, at least--was watching football on television, which I did
with a zeal that got more and more on Ralph's nerves. His lifelong hatred
of sport made it impossible for him to share my preoccupation with
gambling on the games, and we slowly drifted apart--he to his kinky
brooding, and me to the TV set, usually far up the mountain at Stan
Dzura's house. On the few occasions when we all went into town together,
Ralph's eccentric behavior so offended the natives that some called him
"the queer" and others called him "Wolfman." By the time we had been there
two weeks he was known everywhere we went as "The Queer and Famous
Wolfman," and he was not much fun to be with.

One by one, we all got off the boat. Ralph went first, as always--and, as
always, he blamed it on me. Which was true, in a way. The whole thing was
my fault. It was my plan that had gone wrong, not Ralph's, and now his
whole family was in the throes of a profound psychotic experience. Some
people can handle ten days in the eye of a hurricane, and some can't.

Ralph was becoming more and more concerned about this aspect of our
situation, as it daily became more desperate. His primitive Welsh ancestry
would allow him to cling almost indefinitely to his own sanity, he felt,
but he was not confident about the ability of his wife or young daughter
to survive a shock of this magnitude. "How many days of abject terror can
an eight-year-old girl endure?" he asked me one day as we shared a pint of
hot gin in his kitchen. "I can already see the signs. She's withdrawing
into herself, gnawing on balls of twine and talking to cockroaches at
night."

"That's why we have insane asylums," I said. "When your neighbors start
talking about their children at Oxford or Cambridge, you can brag that you
have a daughter in Bedlam."

He stiffened, then shook it off and laughed harshly. "That's right," he
said. "I can visit her on weekends, invite all my neighbors to attend her
graduation."

We were half mad ourselves, at this point. All of our desperate efforts to
flee the Big Island had come to naught. We couldn't even get seats on a
plane back to Honolulu, much less to anywhere else.. .. And our Will to
Flee was real: I would have

written a bad check for a charter jet to Tahiti, 2,600 miles, one way--but
the storm had knocked out our telephones and there was no hope of getting
through to anybody more than a mile or two away. The only place we could
be sure of reaching was the bar at the Kona Inn.

**************

The long and tedious ceremony and feast were at last over, and Cook
indicated that they would like to set up an encampment at the heiau.
Chiefs Parea and Kanina understood at once, and when Cook selected a
walled field of sweet potatoes, with many assurances of compensation for
the owner, the priests stuck their wands on the wall to consecrate and
"taboo" it.

They now returned to their boat and as they passed through the village,
Cook in his red cloak, men, women and children all dropped onto their
knees and lay with their heads to the ground until they had passed. Lono!
. . . Lono! . . .

What he did not know, and never did learn, was that he had been
acknowledged as the incarnation of the god Lono. His arrival was the
greatest event in Hawaii's history. Lono makua was die Hawaiian god of the
season of abundance and relaxation, who was said to process clockwise
about the island to be greeted by white banners and elaborate ceremonies
of obeisance. Cook had arrived, at the appointed time, and by reason of
his decision to sail slowly offshore for better trading, had indeed
progressed slowly and clockwise about the island, his standard at his
masthead a divine acknowledgement of the white banners ashore. And
properly, and according to tradition, he had corne to rest at Kealakekua,
"the path of the gods," in his miracle giant canoe opposite the heiau in
the middle of the god's season, in time for the great ceremonies of
worship annually accorded to him for the abundance of riches he caused the
soil to grant them.

Cook may have been late for the Arctic summer but the timing of his
arrival off Hawaii could not be faulted. His subsequent actions did have a
near-divine verisimilitude, and the climax had now been reached with the
ceremonies he had just undergone. Everything that he experienced over the
following two weeks conformed with the legend of the god Lono. It is
little wonder that his reception--"this remarkable homage" as King
described it--here at Hawaii was so different from that at any other
Polynesian island, and that the natives had been thrown into a state of
near-hysteria. Not even the oldest citizen with the longest memory could
recall hearing from his oldest ancestor of the appearance in incarnated
form of the great god Lono.

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

***********************

TRAPPED IN A QUEER PLACE

It is Monday night on the Kona Coast, two days before Christmas. Three
o'clock in the morning. No more Monday night football. The season is over.
No more Howard Cosell and no more of that shiteating lunatic with the
rainbow-striped afro wig. That freak should be put to sleep, and never
mind the reasons. We don't need that kind of craziness out here in Hawaii,
not even on TV . .. and especially not now, with the surf so high and wild
thugs in the streets of Waikiki and this weather so foul for so long that
people are starting to act crazy. A lot more people than normal for this
time of year are going to flip out, if we don't see the sun by Christmas.

They call it "Kona Weather"; gray skies and rough seas, hot. rain in the
morning and mean drunks at night, bad weather for coke fiends and boat
people. ... A huge ugly cloud hangs over the island at all times, and this
goddamn filthy sea pounds relentlessly up on the rocks in front of my
porch.... The bastard never sleeps or even rests; it just keeps coming,
rolling, booming, slamming down on the rocks with a force that shudders
the house every two or three minutes.

I can feel the sea in my feet as I sit here and type, even in those
moments of nervous quiet that usually mean a Big One is on its way,
gathering strength out there in the darkness fpr another crazed charge on
the land.

My shirt is damp with a mixture of sweat and salt spray. My cigarettes
bend like rubber and the typing paper is so limp that we need waterproof
pens to write on it ... and now that evil white foam is coming up on my
grass, just six feet away from the porch.

This whole lawn might be halfway to Fiji next week. Last winter's Big
Storm took the furniture off every porch on this stretch of the coast and
hurled boulders the size of TV sets into people's bedrooms. Half the lawn
disappeared overnight and the pool filled up with rocks so big that they
had to be lifted out with a crane.

Our pool is a lot closer to the sea now. On the night we arrived I was
almost sucked into the surf by a wave that hit while I was standing on the
diving board, and the next day an even bigger one rolled over the pool and
almost killed me.

We stayed away from the pool for a few days, after that. It makes a man
queasy to swim laps in a pool where the sea might come and get you at any
moment, with no warning at all. It is like getting hit by a moeter
(moeter). Meptpr? Meotor? Meteor . . . yes that sounds right: like getting
hit by a meteor while driving to work on the freeway.

Ralph is hunkered down next door in a state of abject terror.

The whole family is sleeping on the living room floor with all their
baggage packed and ready to flee for their lives on a moment's notice.
When I tried to get in and steal Ralph's TV

for the late basketball game I almost stepped on the child's head as I
came over the edge of that slimy wooden porch. , Why do they lie to us?

That, is what haunts me now, the weird fishhook in this story that keeps
me from just leaping on it like some kind of brute on the run coming up on
a high polished brass fire pole and suddenly, ... yes, a way out...

Zoom. .. . Grab the pole, through the floor, out of sight, big black
rubber pad at the bottom. And after that, run like a bastard and never
look back ... because whatever's after you is probably in better shape
than you are, and it probably won't slow down.

Those buggers run 26 consecutive five-minute miles. But not even that is
fast enough to stay ahead of that thing that keeps gaining...

Why don't they ride motorcycles? Why indeed?

We will have to deal with that later, for good or ill. All we know, for
now, and all we need to know, is that this goddamn rotten surf is -still
thundering up on the lawn at five in the morning and this dirty Hawaiian
nightmare has been going on for thirteen straight days.

BOMB FEVER

After two weeks on the Kona Coast I found myself

looking for stray dogs to run over, every time I drove into town . .. and
the drunker I got, the more dogs I wanted to kill.

The only other thing that makes sense is bombs, and we reached that point
in Kona on Christmas Eve. Here is a wild scrawl that I found on a page in
my notebook, dated December 25:

This filthy goddamn sea is still raging and pounding on the rocks in front
of my porch. Somewhere to the west is a monster storm .of some kind, with
40-knot winds and 35-foot seas. That is a typhoon I think. We are paying
$1,000 a week to sit out here in the rain on the edge of this savage black
rock and wait for the annual typhoon--like the fools they know us to be.

Well, fuck these people. They lied to us, and their lies have caused us to
suffer .. . which means we must go to the mattresses and bomb them into
the sea. We've been crouched like dumb wet animals in this place for
fifteen days now, and that's at least ten too many. We are living on the
edge of the sea, but we can't go near the water. To dive off those rocks
in front of the houses would mean instant death. Fifty feet in front of my
typewriter is a living thundering hell of white foam and riptides and huge
blasts of spray that not even a shark could survive in. The time has come
for vengeance.

The time came yesterday in fact. We finally got weird enough, around
midnight on Christmas Eve, to set off a huge Chinese bomb on the front
porch of a local charter fisherman's house. It went off with a genuinely
terrifying blast about three-tenths of a second after I put the match to
the fuse.

I have set off a lot of firecrackers, but nothing I've ever lit had a kick
like this bastard. I tried to run, but the fuse was so quick that I was
only a step and a half into my stride when suddenly the whole world turned
bright scorching yellow and I was tumbling around in the bushes about ten
feet across the driveway. I wound up on my knees, with all the hair burned
off my legs, staring back at the house as it disappeared in the eye of a
wild fireball that I remember thinking at the time would be the last thing
I'd ever see.

This thing was no firecracker; it was a flat-out Bomb--2,490 bright red
Chinese firecrackers packed into a 10-pound lump and nicely wrapped with a
time-release fuse that makes the explosion seem to go on forever. Most
firecrackers explode and die instantly, but this thing went off like God's
own drumroll .. . and it kept going off, and it kept getting louder, until
finally I got The Fear. The noise was too intense, and the fireball was
getting bigger; the porch seemed to be coming apart in very slow motion,
and I heard a scream from inside.

There were two of them in there, and the eerie pitch of that scream told
me that one had already gone mad--while the bomb was still happening--and
the thought of it filled me with horror. I was slumped on my knees in the
driveway, so close to the edge of the fireball that I knew it would make
me blind if I kept my eyes open--but I couldn't close them; I was
paralyzed with awe, by this terrible thing I had wrought.

This is not what I meant, I thought. Not what I meant at all. It was
supposed to be a joke, a symbolic gesture of sorts . .. the time had come,
I felt, to reestablish the ancient Hawaiian "Law of the Splintered Oar."

**

The Law of the Splintered Oar

At the time--before Hawaii was unified--a series of inter-island wars
prevailed among riva! chiefs. King Kamehameha I, himself, made a series of
destructive and senseless raids upon peaceful coasts and peopie. In one of
these raids, he attacked some fishermen, and in return, one man hit
Kamehameha on the head with an Oar. The force was so great that a second
blow would have been fatal. Later, when the fisherman was captured and
brought before Kamehameha, he did not kill the man, but admitted that his
own attack had been wrong, and that all such wanton attacks were wrong. As
a result, the Law of the Splintered Oar came into being, providing
protection for peaceful citizens from raids and senseless pillaging by
rival chiefs.

**

The notion had come to me fast, as good notions will, and I immediately
went to the phone. It was eleven o'clock on Christmas Eve, our fourteenth
day on this foggy, surf-whipped rock, and life was getting tense. But
nobody had lied to me for three or four hours and I was just into the
second stage of trying to relax, when all of a sudden the drunken
caretaker veered into some kind of sleazy rap about selling me a tin boat
that he had stashed on a bay somewhere in Alaska, for $12,000-- so I could
fish in the ocean for herring and make $50,000 a day.

Once I had the boat (along with a "permit"--another $60 up front) I could
go out with the fleet and drop my net with the others. Right. And for the
next three weeks we would stay awake twenty-four hours a day, ram-feeding
each other with handfuls of speed and hauling constantly on the nets.

"We get a little crazy out there," he said, "but it's worth it. Fifty
thousand dollars a day!"

I nodded and stared out to sea, feeling the bile rise. Jesus, I thought,
these people have no shame. First the Kona Coast, and now a herring scam
in Alaska. On Christmas Eve, for $12,000 cash....

I stood up suddenly. "Okay," I said. "The joke's over. It's time for the
bomb."

"What?" he said, "you want a bomb?"

"I have a bomb," I said. "I have six goddamn bombs and a long white beard
and these lies are driving me mad   Where's the phone?"

He pointed, and I dialed the first number that came into my head. It was
Captain Steve, who had taken us out on his boat the day before and caught
no fish. No fish at all--which was not a surprise to me, but Ralph took it
hard. They had strapped him into the fighting chair at dawn, facing
backwards into our wake and a thick fog of diesel fumes; then they put a
gigantic rod and reel in his lap and told him to hang on, because the bait
he was trailing would be swallowed at any moment by a fish the size of a
bull moose, which would then erupt from the deep like a missile and "take
off across the top of the water at seventy miles an hour."

Ralph nodded solemnly as we tightened the straps, "Well, well," he said.
"That's bloody fast, I'd say."

I laughed. "Don't worry, Ralph, it's all bullshit. We won't catch a
fucking thing." [<(] He smiled nervously. "That's a bloody fast fish," he
muttered.

Seventy miles an hour on the surface? And you say it's the size of a
bull?" He glanced down at the reel in his hand. "Do we have the proper
equipment?""

"Damn right," said Captain Steve. "Just be sure to keep your

hands off the reel when he takes off. That line will go out so fast that
the reel will get hot enough to explode in your hands, like a bomb."

The fish never happened.

But the bomb did. It was nothing personal, but I felt it had to be done. .
. -

Ralph and his family had never been west of San Francisco and the only
palm tree they'd ever seen was on the Universal lot in Hollywood. . . .
But now, as Christmas approached, they found themselves marooned in a
wooden shack on the edge of some barren wave-whipped black rock in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean, with nobody speaking their language and
estranged from even their closest friends.

The British are very sentimental about Christmas. They want the snow and
the slush of England, diseased beggars ringing bells on every street
corner, news of food riots on the telly, the familiar sickening chill of a
stone home with no furnace and the family huddled cheerfully around a pot
of burning coal on Christmas morning. They are not comfortable with the
idea of Saint Nick coming in on a surfboard with a sack full of
cockroaches and a TV Guide filled with nothing but incomprehensible
American "football" games for the next two weeks.

****************

Some days later Cook learned that the king of Hawaii, no less, had arrived
at Kealakekua and was to visit him. James King was at this time stationed
ashore in command of the encampment to ensure its security. He had had no
troubles at all from the natives. The natives would sometimes sit on the
wall watching the incomprehensible activities of Bayly and his assistants
and the impressive activities of the carpenters with their wonderful tools
that could work timber with such seeming ease and accuracy.

The escorting chiefs, dressed in elaborate cloaks and hats, began to sing
as they approached the Resolution, chanting with great solemnity, and then
standing up. As they came near, the reception party on board observed that
the second canoe held also High Priest Koa, hunched and shaking as always,
elaborately attired and surrounded by hideous busts made of basketwork.
These were covered with multicolored feathers, the eyes represented by
pearl oyster shell, the distorted mouths filled with the teeth of dogs.

The king himself remained seated when his canoe came alongside the
gangway. He was dressed in a magnificent cloak and with an equally
magnificent feather cap on his head. The chanting died, a voice called
out. It was suddenly clear that the king had come out only to escort Cook
to the shore, where the ceremonies were to take place, and would not again
be corning on board.

Cook was pulled ashore in his pinnace, King had already turned out the
marines' guard, who made their usual dishevelled and sloppy showing. The
formal meeting was to take place in Bayly's largest tent, and the
lieutenant observed carefully the king and his entourage as they
approached from the shore. Flanking the king were his sons, and following
behind a number of chiefs; the king's nephew Chief Kamehameha, a
ferocious-looking individual with his long hair plastered all over with
paste and powder; a particularly vigorous and important looking Chief
Kalirnu; another muscular individual, Chief Ku'a, and several more. A
parade as formidable as it was bizarre.

King watched Cook wailing patiently for the ceremonies to begin, a weary
expression on his face, towering above all these islanders in spite of his
middle-aged stoop. Then the king stepped forward, standing erect and
without assistance but shaking all over as badly as High Priest Koa.

It was not until this moment, when in turn the king tore off his cloak and
put it around Cook's shoulders, and then lifted his hat and placed it oil
Cook's head, that he exposed his face for the first time. Like the high
priest's, it was peeling and covered in sores, the eyes were red and
watery, but the expression through the ravages of kava was happy and
benign.

To the lieutenant's astonishment, the King of Hawaii was none other than
the Terreeoboo they had met off Maui; it was King Terreeoboo receiving the
great god Lono himself.

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

****************

SOUTH POINT

We had been trying to take his boat out for almost a week, but the sea was
so rough that there was no point in even leaving the harbor. "We could

probably get out," he said, "but we'd never get back

in."

After a week of bad drinking and brooding, Captain Steve finally came up
with a plan. If it was true that the weather was really turned around,
then logic decreed that the normally savage waters on the other side of
the island would now be calm as a lake.

"No problem," he assured me. "It's South Point for us, Big Guy. Let's get
the boat ready. . , ."

Which we did. But the surf got worse, and after five or six more days of
grim waiting, my brain began to go soft. We drove to the tops of
volcanoes, we drank heavily, set off many bombs.... More storms came, the
bills mounted up, and the days dragged by like dead animals.

As New Year's Eve approached it was clear that we were going to have to do
something desperate to get in the water. In lieu of diving, fishing or
even swimming, Juan and I had been forced to take up golf, a game I hadn't
played in twenty years--not since the days when me and Bill Smith anchored
the Male High School Golf Team back in Louisville and lost every match we
played. We all have our winter dreams, and bad golf is one of mine . ..
but it is not the kind of thing you want to have to resort to as a final
retreat from the surf.

On the night before Juan was scheduled to fly back to his holding-pen in
Colorado, we had a kind of final family send-off dinner for him at the
Kona Inn. Captain Steve had called earlier that day to say that the swell
was finally down enough so that we could probably risk getting out of the
harbor tomorrow, but by this time nobody believed anything he said and the
trip to South Point would need two days anyway . . . so even if it
happened, we would have to do it alone.

Ralph was off the water completely and forever. His one trip on the boat
had been such a nightmare that he had focused all his remaining energies
to whatever could be found on the shore. His trip to the Volcano House had
not yielded much, so now he was determined to confront both the ghost of
Captain Cook and the legend of King Kamehameha at the same time. Ever
since I'd told him that the official "Captain Cook Monument" on the wrong
side of Kealakekua Bay was in fact a deeded piece

of England on U.S. soil, he had made up his mind to go there and do
whatever Englishmen do when they find some far corner of England to cling
to on the edge of some foreign isle.

The access by sea was easy, but not in Kona weather; so he said he would
take the whole family in by the land route, a tortuous five-mile hike down
the cliffs from the highway. The walk down was not bad, but getting out
was something else again. Anna and Sadie were ready to make the hike and
worship at the only shrine they had.

It was a nasty trip, and I wanted no part of it. Captain Steve and I had
seen it from his boat, the Haere Marue, on an earlier trip down the coast.
The Cook monument was a small marble pillar like a miniature Washington
Monument perched out on the edge of the black rocks. The U.S. government
officially and formally gave this tiny piece of land to England, as a
gesture of diplomatic gratitude for all that Captain Cook had done: he had
given his life, in fact, to discover a pile of rocks in the middle of the
Pacific that would later become the 50th state of the Union and our only
real base in the Pacific.

The history of Hawaii is so fouled with greed, bungling, and dumb cowboy
diplomacy, that the decadent gang ruling England at the time should have
been hung by their heels like Mussolini for letting these islands go in
exchange for a pillar of concrete. England might have controlled the whole
Pacific for the next two hundred years, if the Earl of Sandwich hadn't
been so deeply involved at the time with sponsoring King George III for
membership in the Hellfire Club that he couldn't see anything beyond the
end of his own gnarled organ. The Earl was into orgies that year, and the
King was trying to cope with a nasty little insurrection called "The
American Revolution." By the time Captain Cook hit the beach at Kealakekua
Bay the British Army was mired down in Virginia at a place called
Yorktown, the Earl of Sandwich--the first Lord of the Admiralty and the
patron for whom these islands were originally named-- was so busy running
women in and out of the Hellfire Club that he barely had time to think
about anything else.

Not even Sir Francis Dashwood, one of the most infamous degenerates ever
to walk the streets of London or anywhere else, saw the need to take time
out from his talks with Benjamin Franklin to consider the implications of
the fact that his friend Sandwich had in fact discovered a place that
might have allowed England to control the whole Pacific Ocean.

****************

Kamehameha seems to have been early distinguished by enterprise, energy,
decision of character, and unwearied perseverance in the accomplishment of
his objects. Added to these, he possessed a vigorous constitution, and an
unrivaled acquaintance with all the warlike games and athletic exercises
of his country. To these qualities of mind and body he was probably
indebted for the extensive power and protracted dominion which he
exercised over the Sandwich Islands.

Kamehameha was undoubtedly a prince possessing shrewdness and great
strength of character. During his reign, the knowledge of the people was
much enlarged, and their comforts in some respects increased; their
acquisition of iron tools facilitated many of their labors; the
introduction of firearms changed their mode

of warfare; and in many cases, cloth of European manufacture was
substituted for that made of native bark. But these improvements appear to
be rather the result of their intercourse with foreigners, than of any
measures of their sovereign; though the encouragement he gave to all
foreigners visiting the islands was, no doubt, advantageous in these
respects.

He has been called the Alfred of the Hawaiians; but he appears rather to
have been their Alexander, ambition and a desire of conquest having been
his ruling passions during the greater part of his life, though toward its
close avarice superseded them.

The Journal of William Ellis

****************

The first person I saw when we walked into the Kona Inn that night was
Ackerman. He was sitting at the Kona Inn bar with a sleazy-looking person
in bell-bottom Levi's whom I recognized as a notorious dope lawyer from
California, a man we'd met at one of the Marathon parties in Honolulu
where he was passing out his business cards to everybody within reach and
saying, "Hang on to this--you'll need me sooner or later."

Jesus, I thought. These leeching bastards are everywhere. First they only
smoked the stuff, then they started selling it, and now they're gnawing at
the roots of the whole drug culture like a gang of wild moles. They will
be standing like pillars of salt at all our doorways when the great bell
rings.

One of the reasons I'd come to Hawaii was to get away from lawyers for a
while, so I herded our party in the other direction and down to our table
looking out on the seawall.

Ralph and Anna and Sadie were already there, and Ralph was raving drunk.
As we approached the table, he looked up at Captain Steve and snarled:
"You again! What lies are you selling tonight? More fish stories?"

Steve smiled nervously. "No, Ralph. No lies tonight. I've learned my
lesson---you're a bad man to lie to."

"Not like me," I said. "I'm easy. We're off to South Point tomorrow." I
sat down at the table and lit a joint, which nobody seemed to notice.
Ralph was staring at me with a look of shock and disgust on his face.

"I can't believe it," he muttered. "You're really going out on that silly
boat again?"

I nodded. "That's right, Ralph. We finally figured it out--if this side of
the island is rough, then the other side must be calm." Captain Steve
smiled and shrugged his shoulders, as if the logic spoke for itself.

"And South Point," I continued, "is the closest place we can get to the
other side, that's where the weather breaks."

"You should come with us, Ralph," said Captain Steve. "It'll be calm as a
lake down there, and it's a real mysterious place."

"It's the land of Po," I said. "A desolate bottomless pit in the ocean,
within sight of the cliffs on shore." I nodded wisely. "You've been
looking for King Kam's burial place--maybe South Point is it."

Ralph gave me the stink-eye, but said nothing. He had already fallen in
love with King Kamehameha--mainly on the basis of what little he knew
about the "Law of the Splintered Oar" --and he was convinced that our
story lay somewhere in the ancient burial caves around the City of Refuge
and Kealakekua Bay. In any case, it was not at sea. "There are no fish,"
he muttered once again, "not even on the menu. All they have tonight is
some kind of frozen mush from Taiwan."

"Don't worry, Ralph," I said. "We'll have all the fresh fish we can eat
when I get back from South Point. Once we get around the corner down there
to some calm waters I will plunder this sea like no man has ever plundered
it before."

My fiancee was giving me the stink-eye now. Juan was staring up at the
ceiling fan and Captain Steve was grinning like it all made good sense.

Just then I felt a hand on my shoulder. "Hello, Doc," said a voice behind
me. "I've been wondering where you were."

I swung quickly around in my chair to see Ackerman smiling down at me, and
the arm he extended was still blue. I stood up and we shook hands, then I
introduced him around the table. Nobody really cared. We had already met
too many strange people, by Ralph's count, and it was clear that Steve
already knew him. Laila eyed his blue arm and gave a curt nod, as if some
odd and disturbing scent had wafted through the room.

I was glad to see Ackerman, and now that he'd shaken the dope lawyer I
stood up and took him aside. We walked out to the lawn and I handed him
the joint. "Hey," I said. "How'd you like to make a run down to South
Point tomorrow?" "What?" he said. "South Point?" "Yeah," I replied. "Just
you and me and Steve. He says the weather should be okay, once we get
around the point."

He laughed. "That's insane," he said, "but what the hell, why not? Steve's
okay. He's a pretty good sailor."

"Good," I said, "let's do it. At least we'll get out on the water."

He chuckled. "Yeah. We will do that." He finished off the joint and
flipped it into the sea. "I'll bring some chemicals," he said. "We may
need them." "Chemicals?"

He nodded. "Yeah. I have some powerful organic mescaline. I'll bring it
along," "Right," I said. "That's a good idea-- in case we get tired."

He slapped me on the back as we walked inside to the table. "Welcome to
the Kona Coast, Doc. You're about to get

what you came for.

WE'RE ALL EQUAL IN THE OCEAN

I took Juan to the airport the next morning for the flight to Honolulu.
He'd had a good time, he said--especially with the bombs and the
high-speed driving lessons--but he was not unhappy to be leaving. "There's
too much tension," he said. "Everybody seems just about to go crazy. I
couldn't stand living this way very long."

"You'll learn," I said. "You get used to it after a while."

"Or else you go nuts," he said with a grin. We were walking down the
breezeway toward the Aloha Airlines loading gate, surrounded by dozens of
Japs.

"Yeah," I said. "That's right. Totally nuts."

We walked the rest of the way in silence. The look on his face was
pensive, vaguely amused. When we got to the gate the plane was about to
leave, so he had to run for it. I watched him loping across the tarmac
toward the plane and smiled. How long has he known--I thought--that Uncle
Ralph is crazy?

On the way back to town I stopped by the Haere Marue and found Captain
Steve already on the boat, wrestling tanks of compressed air off the dock
and into a storage locker near the stern. He looked up as I scrambled down
the ledge of black rocks to where the boat was tied up. "Ackerman was just
here," he said. "I guess he's serious about making the trip."

"Yeah," I said. "I gave him the grocery list."

"I know," he said. "He's gone to Tanagughi's to get the stuff. All we need
now is booze."

"And ice," I said, turning to climb back up the rocks. "How's the weather
look?"

"No problem," he said, glancing out toward the sea. "The storm finally
broke."

When I arrived at the Union Jack Liquor Store in the middle of downtown
Kailua, Ackerman was waiting for me in a Datsun pickup full of grocery
bags. "I got everything," he said, "You owe me three hundred and
fifty-five dollars."

"Good God," I muttered. Then we went into the Union Jack and loaded up my
VISA card with four cases of Heineken beer, two quarts each of Chivas
Regal and Wild Turkey, two bottles of gin and a gallon of orange juice,
along with six bottles of their best wines and another six bottles of
chami cocktail party that night.

The plan was for Ralph, my fiancee and The Family to meet us at South
Point around sunset for an elegant evening meal on the fantail of the
Haere Marue. It would take us six hours to get there, at trolling speed,
but it was only an hour by road--so they could spend the afternoon at the
City of Refuge and still get to South Point before we did. Captain Steve
had arranged our meeting point--a small beach in a cove at the
southernmost tip of the island. He'd even arranged a radiotelephone
contact through a friend of his

who had a ranch near South .Point. 'Don't worry," he told Ralph. 'You can
drive your car right  down to the beach. And when you see the boat, just
blow your horn and .flash the headlights. We'll come in and

you up." For dinner. And cocktails. Then they would drive back to the
compound,  while we spent the night on the boat and did our diving in the
morning. After that, we would troll back up the coast and .arrive at the
Jionoahou around dusk,

for another cocktail party and a big fish dinner at home.

That was the plan. No problem at all. We would cruise down to South Point
and nave dinner on the fantail.

We left the Honokau not long after ten-thirty, poking carefully through a
crust of smoking driftwood in the harbor. A boat had caught fire the night
before and burned to the waterline. It was the Blue Pacific, Lee Marvin's
old boat. There had been some kind of long dispute about ownership,
Ackerman explained, and now the dispute was over.

"Jesus Christ," said Captain Steve as he eased his own boat through the
dirty smoking debris. "They won't collect any insurance on that one. I can
smell the kerosene from out here."

The two charter boats on either side of the Blue Pacific were being soaked
down with hoses by potbellied Hawaiians aiming nozzles from the dock. They
waved cheerfully as we idled out of the harbor. Captain Steve waved back
and yelled something about the surf being up. The smoke in the harbor put
a haze between us and the hot morning sun. As we passed the main channel
buoy I looked back and saw the peaks of both Mauna Lea and Mauna Koa in
the sky for the first time since I'd been there. The whole island is
normally covered with a hamburger-shaped cloud for most of every day, but
this morning of our departure for South Point was a rare exception.

I took it as a good omen, but I was wrong. By nightfall we would find
ourselves locked in a death battle with the elements, wallowing helplessly
in the worst surf I'd ever seen and half crazy with fear and strong
chemicals.

We brought it on ourselves. No doubt about that. Ackerman knew it was
crazy from the start--and so, I suspect, did Captain Steve. I was the one
who'd fallen for this lunatic scheme: right, we'll just make a six-hour
run down the coast, then duck around a corner to some rumor of a protected
cove and dive in a forest of black coral. No problem. Invite the whole
family down for dinner. We'll just go in and pick them up on the beach. ..
.

We had both the Wall Street Journal and Soldier of Fortune on the boat. I
had put them on my card at the Union Jack, but the run down to South Point
was not calm enough for reading. We staggered around the boat like winos
for most of the trip, keeping the boat headed due south against a crossing
sea. The swell was coming strong out of the southwest. At one point we
stopped to pick up a rotted life preserver with the words "Squire/Java"
painted in the cork.

Captain Steve spent most of his time at the wheel high up on the flying
bridge, while Ackerman and I stayed down in the cockpit smoking marijuana
and waiting for the reels to go off.

I had long since got over the notion that just because we were

fishing we were going to catch fish. The whole idea of trailing big-bore
lines from the outriggers and rumbling along at trolling speed was absurd.
The only way we were going to get any fish, I insisted, was by going over
the side with scuba tanks and spear guns, to hunt them where they lived.
Every once in a while either Ackerman or I would take a turn at the wheel,
but never for very long. Captain Steve was convinced that we might hook a
marlin or at least a big ahi at any moment, and he wanted to be at the
controls when it happened. He spent most of the afternoon on the bridge,
staring down at the barren, deep gray water through polarized fishing
glasses.

Ackerman seemed to share my aggressive pessimism about the possibility of
catching fish, but he kept a professional eye on the lines anyway. "I am
the first mate," he explained, "and I have a certain professional pride."
I had almost forgotten that he was a part of that tight little tribe of
licensed charter captains that forms the only real elite on the Kona
Coast. "We're all equal in the ocean," he explained. "That's surfer talk,
but it makes a weird kind of sense."

I agreed. It was understood, in some way that has only to do with the sea,
that either of us would be capable of getting the boat safely back into
the harbor if Captain Steve, for some reason, could not.

Ackerman was obviously at home on the boat. He knew where everything went,
and why, and not much was going to surprise him. I'd invited him to come
along without giving it much thought, but only after hearing Steve say
several times that they were "pretty close friends."

There were no fish. We trolled all the way down, but the only signs of
life we saw between Kailua and South Point was a school of porpoises and
some birds. It was a long hot ride, and by mid-afternoon all three of us
were jabbering drunk on beer.

It was just before sundown when we finally rounded the corner at South
Point. The sea had been rough on the run down the Kona side of the
island--but it was nothing compared to what we encountered when we came
around the point.

The sea was so high and wild that we could only gape at it. No words were
necessary. We had found our own hurricane, and there was no place to hide
from it.

At sundown I switched to gin and Ackerman broke out a small vial of white
powder that he sniffed up his nose off the tip of a number 10 fish hook,
then offered the vial to me.

"Be careful," he said. "It's not what you think."

I stared at the vial, examining the contents closely and bracing my feet
on the deck as the boat suddenly tilted and went up on the hump of a
swell.

"It's China White," he said, gripping the back of the fighting chair as we
came down hard in the slough.

Jesus, I thought. I'm out here with junkies. The boat rolled again,
throwing me off balance on the wet deck with a cup of gin in one hand and
a vial of heroin in the other.

I dropped them both as I slid past Ackerman and grabbed the ladder to keep
from going over the side.

Ackerman lunged for the vial with the speed of a young cobra and caught it
on one bounce, but it was already wet and he stared at it balefully, then
tossed it away in the sea. "What the hell," he said. "I never liked the
stuff anyway."

I pulled myself over to the chair and sat down. "Me either," I said. "It's
hard on the stomach."

He eyed me darkly for a moment and I planted both feet, not knowing what
to expect. It is bad business to drop other people's heroin--especially
far out at sea with a storm coming up--and I didn't know Ackerman that
well. He was a big rangy bastard, with the long loose muscles of a
swimmer, and his move on the bouncing vial had been impressively fast. I
knew he could get me with the gaffing hook before I reached the ladder.

I resisted the urge to call Captain Steve. Were they both junkies? I
wondered, still poised on the edge of the white naugahyde chair. What kind
of anglers carry China White to work?

"It's a good drug for the ocean," Ackerman said, as if I'd been thinking
out loud. "A lot of times it's the only way to keep from killing the
clients."

I nodded, pondering the long night ahead. If the first mate routinely
snorted smack at the cocktail hour, what was the captain into?

It occurred to me that I didn't really know either one of these people.
They were strangers, and now I was trapped on a boat with them, twenty
miles off the far western edge of America with the sun going down and deep
black water all around us.

The land was out of sight now, lost in a desolate night fog. The sun went
down and the Haere Marue rumbled on through the waves toward South Point,
the terrible Land of Po. The red and green running lights on our bow were
barely visible from the stern, barely thirty feet away. The night closed
around us like smoke, cold and thick with the smell of our diesel exhaust
fumes.

It was almost seven o'clock when the last red glow of the sun disappeared,
leaving us to run blind and alone by the compass. We sat for a while on
the stern, listening to the sea and the engines and the occasional dim
crackling of voices on the shortwave radio up above the high-bridge, where
Captain Steve was perched, like some kind of ancient mariner.

THE LAND OF PO

The sea was not getting any calmer as we approached our destination, a
small beach at the foot of sheer black cliffs. Captain Steve took us in
about halfway, then slowed to a crawl and came scrambling down the ladder.
"I don't know about this," he said nervously. "The swell seems to be
picking up."

Ackerman was staring at the beach, where huge breakers foamed.

The first alarm came from Captain Steve, up above, when he suddenly shut
down the engines and came back down the ladder.

"Get ready," he said. "We're in for a long night." He stared nervously
into the sea for a moment, then darted into the cabin and began hauling
out life jackets.

"Forget it," said Ackerman. "Nothing can save us now. We may as well eat
the mescaline." He cursed Captain Steve again. "This is your fault, you
stupid little bastard. We'll all be dead before morning."

Captain Steve shrugged as he swallowed the pill. I ate mine and set about
assembling the hibachi I'd bought that morning to cook our fresh fish
dinner. Ackerman leaned back in his chair and opened a bottle of gin.

We spent the rest of the night raving at each other and _ wandering
distractedly around the boat like rats cast adrift in a shoebox,
scrambling around the edges and trying to keep away from each other. The
casual teamwork of the sundown hours became a feverish division of labor,
with each of us jealously tending our own sector.

I had the fire, Ackerman had the weather, and Captain Steve was in charge
of the fishing operation. The hibachi was tilting dangerously back and
forth in the cockpit behind the fighting chair, belching columns of flame
and greasy smoke every time I hit it with another whack of kerosene. The
importance of keeping the fire going had become paramount to everything

else, despite the obvious and clearly suicidal danger.

We had three hundred gallons of diesel fuel in

the tanks down below, and any queer pitch

of sea could have spilled flaming charcoal

all over the cockpit and turned the

whole boat into a fireball--

putting all three of us in the water,

where we would be instantly picked up in the surf and dashed to death on
the rocks.

No matter, I thought. We must keep the fire going. It had become a symbol
of life, and I was not about to let it die down.

The others agreed. We had long since abandoned any idea of cooking
anything

For dinner -- and in fact we had thrown most of the food overboard by that
time, thinking to use it for bait--but we all understood that as long as

the fire burned, we would survive. My appetite had died around sundown,

and now I w as covered with layers of cold mescaline sweat. Even once in a
while a shudder would race up my spine causing my

body to tremble In these moments ny conversation would suddenly collapse,
without warning, and my voice would quaver

for a few seconds while I tried to calm down.

"Jesus," I said to Captain Steve some time around midnight, "it's lucky
you got rid of that cocaine. The last thing we need right now is some kind
of crank."

He nodded wisely, still watching the flashlight in the water, then
suddenly spun around in the chair and uttered a series of wild cries. His
eyes were unnaturally bright and his lips seemed to flap as he spoke. "Oh
yes!" he blurted. "Oh hell yes. That's the last thing we need!"

I backed away from him, not taking my eyes off his hands. Ackernian was
nowhere in sight, but I could hear the staccato bleating of his voice from
what seemed like a hundred miles away. He was up on the bow, pacing around
with a gaffing hook in his hands, watching for shifts in the wind and
screaming at the lights on the faraway cliff.

"You brainless Jap bastards!" he yelled. "Douse those goddamn lights!"

Captain Steve was now leaning over the back of the boat sinking another
hot dog down on the end of our line with the flashlight. "What the hell is
wrong with those Japs?" he muttered. "Are they trying to signal us in?"

"Yeah," I said. "It's an old Key West trick--set up a false lighthouse and
lure boats onto the rocks."

Suddenly he leaped back and shouted, "Oh my God, a sea snake!" "What?"

"A sea snake!" he said, pointing down at the water. "Lethal poison,
instant death! It came right up to my hand!"

I shrugged, firing another stream of kerosene into the hibachi and sending
another balloon of yellow fire up into the night. I grabbed the bucket of
water that I was keeping on the deck for emergencies. Captain Steve
staggered sideways, shielding his face from the flames. "Be careful!" he
shouted. "Leave that fire alone!"

"Don't worry," I said, "I know what I'm doing." His hands were clawing
nervously at his pockets. "Where is it?" he hissed. "Did I give you the
bottle?" "What bottle?"

He fell sideways and grabbed the chair as another big wave picked us up.
"The kind  " he screamed. "Who has the goddamn kind?"

I was hanging on to one tin leg of the hibachi, which had almost turned
over. Finally, the wave passed and we settled back into the slough. "You
fool," I said, "it's gone. You took it over the side."

"What are you talking about?" he screamed. "What side?" I watched his eyes
for a moment, then shook my head and

went back into the cabin for a beer. Captain Steve had never tried
mescaline before, and I could see that it was reaching his brain. It was
obvious from the confusion in his eyes that he had no recollection at all
of taking our last bottle of stimulant down with him, in the pocket of his
trunks, when he'd gone down with the scuba tanks to secure our anchor line
around a big rock on the bottom, about 90 feet down. I had grabbed the
bottle away from him when he came up and drunk about half of the salty
bitter mixture in one swallow. Ackerman, quickly understanding the nature
of the tragedy, had drunk off the rest.

We had no choice. There is no point trying to save cocaine after you've
mixed it up with salt water. Captain Steve had missed his share--which was
fair, I thought, and probably just as well. Any fool who will dive to the
bottom of the Pacific Ocean with two grams of cocaine in his pocket is
capable of anything at all; and now he was losing his grip to the
psychedellcs.

Bad business, I thought. It's time to collect the knives.

I woke up at sunrise to find Ackerman passed out like a dead animal from
an overdose of Dramamine and Captain Steve wandering frantically around
the cockpit, grappling with a tangle of ropes and saying over and over to
himself, "Holy Jesus, man! Let's get out of here!"

I came awake and stumbled up from the cabin where I'd spent two hours
sleeping on a cushion covered with fishhooks. We were still in the shadow
of the cliffs and the morning wind was cold. The fire had gone out and our
thermos bottle of coffee had cracked open sometime during the night. The
deck was awash with a slimy mixture of kerosene and floating soot.

But the wind had not shifted. Captain Steve had been awake all night, he
explained, never taking his eyes off the anchor line and ready, at any
moment, to leap into the surf and swim for it.

"I'll never understand how we survived," he muttered, staring up at the
cliffs where the colony of mean Japs was still clustered around their
campfires. "Now I know what they mean about South Point. It is a dangerous
place."

"The Land of Po," I said.

"Yeah," he said, reeling in the last of our all-night fishing lines. All
the hot dogs had been gnawed off by eels, but the hooks were otherwise
clean. Not even a sea snake had taken our wrong-minded bait, and the water
all around us was littered with floating debris: beer bottles, orange
peels, plastic baggies and mangled tuna fish cans. About ten yards off the
stern was an empty Wild Turkey bottle with a piece of paper inside.

Ackerman had tossed it over some time during the night, after finishing
off the whiskey and stuffing the bottle with a sheet of Kona Inn
stationery on which I had scrawled: "Beware. There ARE no fish." I thought
it would be halfway to Guam by now, a warning to other fools who might try
to fish in the Land of Po.

Captain Steve was staring glumly over the side of the boat at the anchor
line. "All we have to do now," he said, "is haul up the anchor and get the
hell out of this place." He shook his head and made a nervous whistling
noise. "Let me tell you one thing for sure," he added, "we are lucky to be
alive right now. That's the worst night I ever spent in my life." He
pointed in the general direction of land, where the surf was still
pounding and foaming against the rocks. "One shift in the wind," he said,
"could have swung us around so fast that I couldn't even have got the
engine started. We'd be driftwood by now."

He was still staring down at the anchor line. The other end of it, I knew,
was tied securely around a rock far below, and we both understood what
would have to be done. There was no way to haul it up, or to maneuver it
loose with the boat, We would have to either chop the line and leave the
anchor behind, or somebody would have to go down with a tank and untie the
knot.

We stood there for a while on the fantail, staring down at the cold black
water. Ackerman was out of the question, so it was either me or Captain
Steve. He had gone down the night before, and I knew it was my turn now.
That was fair. That was the rule of the sea, a true cornerstone of the
macho way of life.

I zipped up my jacket and opened a beer. "How much do anchors cost?" I
asked him.

He shrugged. "Well ... with ninety feet of line, at, say, about two
dollars a foot. . . ." He seemed to be adding it up very carefully in his
mind.

"Yeah," he said finally. "Call it four hundred, maybe four fifty."

"That's cheap," I said, reaching for my belt knife. "I'll give you a
check." I leaned out to grab the anchor line with my other hand, preparing
to cut us loose. Nothing short of extreme physical violence could have got
me in the water that morning.

Captain Steve stayed my hand before I could slash the line. "Wait a
minute," he said. "I can't go back to the harbor with no anchor. They'd
laugh me out of town."

"Fuck those people," I said. "They weren't on the boat last night."

He was strapping on the tanks.

I watched him go over the side and disappear.

********************

It was 4 February, a fine, warm early morning. The natives of Kealakekua
Bay were up early for the word had got about that the great ships were
leaving. The shores on both sides, divided by that great black slab of
cliff, were thick with dark bodies, some waving white cloths.

For Cook's men there was a strong measure of regret at parting after the
contentment occasioned by this visit. For the Hawaiians, it had been a
strange two and a half weeks, busy, emotional, traumatic even, like no
other period in their lives or their history: an unpredicted divine
descent upon the steady round of the seasons; an event of great
satisfaction paid for at a great price.

By the early morning of 6 February they were at the northern extremity of
a deep bay just south of the northern tip of Hawaii, Upolu Point. They had
all but completed their clockwise circumnavigation of the island, in
accordance with the legendary annual practice of Lono. Then it came on to
blow very hard for 36 hours.

On 8 February, three years to the day--almost to the hour-- since Cook had
volunteered at the Admiralty to command this voyage, the Resolution's
foremast split. . . . They could not proceed in this condition, especially
as the old leak under the buttock had opened up again like an unhealable
wound.

In the storm-swept dawn light, Cook had to make the critical decision on
where to put in for repairs. Should he continue to Maui and trust that he
would find shelter on the west or southerly coast, which he had not yet
traced? Or perhaps to another island? Kauai and Niihau had already proved
unpromising. In all their sailing among these islands, Kealakekua Bay was
the only safe anchorage they had discovered.

To give himself time. Cook sent Bligh across the storm-tossed waters to
acquaint Clerke of their situation. Now both ships' companies were
conscious of their dilemma. They had already been too long at Kealakekua
Bay. They had cleared the whole area of its immediately available food.
All those hogs could not have been given to them without depriving the
people of supplies. Repairs would take at least a week, probably two
weeks.

Cook set himself upon the safer of the two courses open to him, and at 10
a.m. on the morning of 8 February, the two sloops bore away south for
their old anchorage, "all hands much chagrined," wrote King, "and damning
the foremast."

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

****************

Ackerman woke up while Captain Steve was down and I told him the story.
"That crazy bastard," he muttered, reaching down for a diving knife that
he kept in a sheath around his leg. "Start the engine. Let him swim back."
He began to cut the line, then hesitated and pulled back. "No," he said,
"the minute we start the engine, he'll hear the noise and come up like a
rocket. We'll have a case of the bends on our hands."

Captain Steve finally emerged from the depths and signaled me to haul in
the anchor. Twenty minutes later we were out of the surf and running north
at easy trolling speed. The Captain had gone groggy while we were hauling
him back into the boat and dropped his scuba tank on Ackerman's foot,
crushing his big toe and putting blood all over the deck. Ackerman gobbled
another handful of Dramamine and fell into a deep stupor. We put his foot
in an ice bag and stretched him out like a corpse on a cushion in the
shade of the bridge.

I took the helm while Captain Steve set the outriggers. "Are you out of
your goddamn rnind?" I yelled down at him from my perch on the tuna tower.
"Get away from those lines! Go to sleep."

"No!" he shouted. "This is a fishing boat! We must catch fish." The strain
of the long night at South Point was beginning to tell on him. His eyes
had swollen up like rotten eggs and he had chewed his own lips so severely
during the night that now he could barely talk. When he tried to climb
back to the bridge he lost his grip on the ladder and fell on his back in
the cockpit, where he thrashed wildly around on the deck in a puddle of
bloody filth.

It was an ugly thing to see. From my seat on the bridge I could look
straight down on the main deck of the Haere Marue and see both the captain
and the first mate badly disabled. One appeared to be dead, with his mouth
hung open and his eyes rolled back in his head, and the other was
twitching around like a fish with a broken neck.

The maze of human wreckage down below looked like something King Kam might
have brought back to Kona in one of his war canoes that got caught in an
ambush on Maui. We were victims of the same flaky hubris that had killed
off the cream of Hawaiian warriors in the time of the Great Wars. We had
gone off in a frenzy of conquest--to the wrong place at the wrong time and
probably for all the wrong reasons--and now we were limping back home with
our decks full of blood and our nerves turned to jelly. All we could hope
for, now, was no more trouble and a welcoming party of good friends and
beautiful women at the dock. After that, we could rest and lick our
wounds. I couldn't leave the wheel, or the boat would start running

in circles and tangle its own propeller in the long fishing lines we were
trailing. In order to keep the lures on the surface I had to maintain a
constant engine speed of 1750rpm and keep moving straight ahead. Any
variation in either the speed or the course might be ruinous. If we fouled
the prop and lost power it would mean calling for help on the radio, then
wallowing helplessly around in the waves for eight hours until a rescue
boat arrived to tow us in.

That was unacceptable. The crew was in no condition to endure another day
and night at sea. I aimed the boat closer to shore and put a bit of weight
on the throttle. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two
points, I reasoned, then a straight line at top speed would be even
shorter.

I was still congratulating myself on my breakthrough into higher
mathematics when I was startled by a squawk from below. I looked over the
rail to see Captain Steve on his knees in the stern, pointing frantically
back at his carefully set lures-- which were now almost airborne, bouncing
across the water like flying fish. "Slow it down!" he was screaming. "Are
you crazy?"

Crazy? I thought. I almost hurled a beer bottle down on his neck. The
course he had set would have taken us far out to sea through the marlin
grounds, a lazy parabolic loop that would  o have added another two or
three hours to the trip. He was still obsessed with the notion that we
were going to catch fish. I could see it in his eyes, the feverish gleam
of Ahab.

"Forget it," I yelled down to him. "The joke's over. It's time to go
home."

The anguished look on his face told me it was useless to argue with him.
There was no room in his mind for the idea of coming back to port without
a fish; and I had a feeling he might go over the side at any moment with a
knife in his teeth, if that's what it took to get one.

And it was, after all, his boat. I was not ready for mutiny, so I eased
off on the throttle and altered our course. This seemed to satisfy him. He
went back to fussing with the lines and drinking beer. I settled back in
the catbird seat and listened to the radio for a while, feeling drowsy as
the sun got hotter and hotter. Every once in a while some outburst of
gibberish on the radio would wake me up:

"... calling Humdinger, do you read me?"

Long pause and crackling of static, then:

"Goddammit, goddammit, yes, goddammit, yes, this is Humdinger. I read you,
what's your location? Over.

"The wrong place, over."

(Harsh laughter and more crackling static . -.)

"Well goddammit you stay there, you bastard, don't come anywhere near me."

"What? Say that again, Humdinger."

"Stay away! I got two nekkid women on board."

(Pause and crackling.)

"What's your location, Humdinger? I'm nekkid myself. Let's get together."

The banter went on for a while, then I lashed the wheel so the boat
wouldn't wander and went down the ladder for a beer. Captain Steve had
crawled into the cabin and passed out on top of the ice locker. I watched
him for a while, making sure he was really sleeping, then I walked back to
the stern and reeled in all the lines. Ackerrnan still looked dead and he
seemed to be barely breathing, so I rolled him over on his side and hung a
bell around his neck so I could hear him if he started vomiting.

Then I went back up on the bridge and aimed the boat straight for the
harbor, taking it so close into shore that I could almost read the signs
up on Highway One. I turned up the radio to cover the engine noise, then
slowly increased our speed until we were planing across the waves like
some kind of mongrel Cigarette boat. Ah ha, I thought, now this is the way
to fish--just run the bastards down, chop their brains off with the prop
and then circle back to pick up whatever's left.

Three hours later I stopped by the buoy outside the harbor and reeled out
the fishing lines, then I twisted Ackerman's leg until he came thrashing
awake like an alligator caught in a trap. "Time to work," I said. "We're
home."

He sat up and looked around, then slowly stood up and reached for the
bottle of rum in the tool box. "Where's the Captain?" he asked.

I pointed to Steve, still asleep on the ice locker, only inches from the
rail. Ackerrnan walked over to him and put a foot in the small of his
back, and shoved him violently over the side.

Captain Steve grabbed wildly for a hand-hold, then disappeared into the
sea. He came sputtering to the surface, still not completely awake, and
clawing desperately at the slippery side of the boat.

Ackerrnan wanted to drag him in with a gaffing hook, but I

restrained him.

After we hauled Captain Steve back aboard he sulked tor a while in the
cockpit, then climbed up to take the wheel. He eased the boat into the
harbor, squatting darkly in his seat on the bridge and avoiding the eyes
of the smiling Kanakas on the

gasoline dock.

Nobody was there to meet us, but it didn't matter. We were warriors,
returned from the Land of Po, and we had terrible stories to tell. But not
in the harbor, or at the bar in the Kona Inn. Our tale was too grim.

Captain Steve was still hunkered down on the bridge when Ackerman and I
finished off-loading our gear and prepared to^ leave. "Where're you guys
going?" he called out. "To Huggo's?"

I shrugged, too weak and whipped to care where I was going, just as long
as it was away from the sea. I felt like driving up the mountain to Waimea
and applying for a job as a cowboy on the Parker Ranch. Get back to the
land for a while, drink gin all night and run around naked with the
menehunes. ' But when I mentioned this to Ackerman he shook his head.
"No," he said. "There's only one place for us now--the City of Refuge."

THE BALCONY LIFE

It was time to leave. Ackerman's notion of fleeing to the City of Refuge
had seemed like a good idea at the time, but the scene we found back at ,
the compound on our return from South Point was too r-^1 ugly to cure by
anything as simple as a drive down the coast to some temple of ancient
superstition where we may or may not have found refuge. Right, I thought,
never mind that silly native bullshit. Where's a telephone? What we need
now is a quick call to Aloha Airlines.

Ackerman agreed. We were both stunned by the chaos we saw when we turned
the little VW convertible into the driveway. The same storm that had
almost whipped us to death in the ocean off South Point the night before
had moved north and was now pounding the Kona Coast with fifteen-foot
waves and a blinding monsoon rain. On the way in from the Honokohau we'd
seen cars and mopeds abandoned all along Alii Drive, which was littered
with driftwood and jagged black rocks. Huge waves were breaking over the
highway at Disappearing Beach--which

had long since disappeared, once again--and it took us almost two hours to
get from the boat to the compound which was taking a serious surf.

Both houses were empty, the pool was swamped, the surf was foaming up on
the porch and deck chairs were scattered around the lawn in a maze of what
looked like red seaweed. On closer examination it turned out to be the
slimy wet remnants of two or three hundred thousand Chinese firecrackers,
a flood of red rice paper from the dozens of Chinese Thunder-bombs we'd
been amusing ourselves with. I thought it had been washed out to
sea--which was true, for a while--but it had not washed out far enough,
and now the sea was tossing it back.

Ralph and The Family were gone. The door to their house stood open, and
the place where he'd parked his car was ankle-deep in salt water. The
fronts of both houses were gummed up with a layer of red slime and there
was no sign of life anywhere. Everything was gone; both houses had been
abandoned to the ravaging surf, and my first thought was that everything
in them including the occupants had been sucked out to sea by riptides and
bashed to death on the rocks.

****************

Everyone noticed the profound change in the atmosphere in the bay, and the
contrast with their first arrival. The waters were empty of canoes, the
black lowering line of cliff revealed not a single spectator along its
crest. Some of Cook's men were uneasy, others, as King observed, felt
their vanity hurt that they were so disregarded. Just as they were
concluding that the entire population had been evacuated or struck down by
some plague, a single canoe put off and headed for the Discovery. Up the
sloop's gangway there climbed a ferocious looking chief wearing a fine
red-feathered cloak. He was the king's nephew, Kamehameha, whose
appearance had so alarmed them three weeks earlier when he had introduced
himself with Terreeoboo's two sons. .. .

The sailmakers, carpenters and the marines, with King again in command,
found no objection to their reinstalling themselves in the old field with
their tents by the heiau. Bayly even got his clock and telescopes ashore
with his tents. The priests seemed as friendly as before, and were ready
to taboo the area again, and the carpenters were able to go about their
special craft of cleaning out the mast's heel, dealing with the sprung
fishes, shaping

new ones from some hard toa wood they had providentially kept from Moorea.

On the following morning King Terreeoboo arrived in the bay as he had
before, in great style and at a fine pace. At once the waters of the bay
were un-tabooed, and suddenly it was almost as if nothing had changed
since those days when there were always numberless canoes plying between
shore and ships, and the noise and bustle of trading lasted from dawn to
dusk.

But things were not the same. Just below the surface, violence now lurked
among these Hawaiians. A great black seam of hostility had been thrust up
close to the surface as if Mauna Loa's volcano had erupted again and a
lava stream of hatred were about to flow.

King Terreeoboo, shaking and held steady by his two sons, came out to the
Resolution. Why had they returned? What were they doing? How long this
time? "He appeared much dissatisfied," noted Jem Burney.

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

****************

Ackerman disagreed, saying they had all probably taken to  higher ground
long before the surf began hitting the porches. That was standard
procedure on Alii Drive in winter storms: first sirens, then roadblocks
and panic, and finally forced evacuation of all beachfront homes by Civil
Defense rescue teams "It happens every year," he said. "We lose a few
houses, a few cars, but not many people."

I was still rummaging through the bedrooms, looking for signs of life with
one eye and watching the sea with the other. A big one, I knew, could come
at any time with no warning at all, rolling over us like a bomb. I had a
vision of Ralph clinging, even now, to some jagged black rock far out in
the roaring white surf, screaming for help and feeling the terrible jaws
of a wolf eel gripping his leg.

What would we do if we suddenly heard his screams and saw him thrashing
around in the sea a hundred yards away?

Nothing. We could only watch, as the waves tossed him up on the rocks,
time after time. By morning he would be ripped to shreds.

I was tempted, for a moment, to get a big spotlight and look for him out
there in the sea, but I didn't want to do it. What if I spotted him? The
sight would haunt me for the rest of my life ... I would have to watch him
die, fixed in the beam of my own spotlight until he finally disappeared,
wild eyes gleaming in the foam of a crashing wave, then sinking out of
sight.. . .

I heard Ackerman's voice just as a monster wave hit the pool and blasted
ten thousand gallons of water straight up in the air.

I scrambled over the porch railing and ran for the driveway. High ground,
I thought. Uphill. Get out of here.

Ackerman was calling from the balcony of the caretaker's cottage. I rushed
up the stairs, soaking wet, and found him sitting at a table with five or
six people who were calmly drinking whiskey and smoking marijuana. All my
luggage, including the typewriter, was piled in a corner of the porch.

Nobody had drowned, nobody was missing I Accepted a join from my fiancee
and breathed deeply .Ralph had flipped out sometime around noon, they
explained, when the sea hurled a fifty-pound stalk of green bananas up on
his porch followed by a wave of red slime. Hundreds of dead fish washed up
on the lawn, the house was suddenly filled with thousands ot flying
cockroaches, and the sea rolled under the floor

The caretaker said Ralph had taken his family to the King Kamehameha Hotel
on the pier in downtown Kailua, after [(] failing to find seats on a night
flight back to England. Where s the dog?" I asked. I knew Sadie had become
strongly attached

to the beast, and there was no sign of its corpse in the general wreckage
of the compound.

"They took it with them," he said. "He asked me to give you this note." He
handed me a crumpled piece of hotel stationery, damp and dark with Ralph's
scrawl.

"I can't stand it anymore," it said. "The storm almost killed us. Don't
call. Leave us alone. The hotel doctor will take care of Rupert and send
him home after quarantine. Please make all arrangements. Do it for Sadie.
Her hair is turning white. It was a terrible experience. I'll get even.
Love, Ralph."

"Jesus," I said. "Ralph's gone. He went soft on us."

"He knew you'd say that," said the caretaker, accepting the joint from
Ackerman and inhaling deeply. "That's why he left you the dog. He said it
was the right thing to do."

I refolded the note and put it in my pocket. "Of course," I said. "Ralph
is an artist. He has a very keen sense of right and wrong."

We sat on the porch for a while, smoking fresh marijuana and listening to
the Amazing Rhythm Aces, then we drove up to Ackerman's for the night. The
compound was flooded and water had soaked all the floors. There was no
point in trying to sleep there.

Ralph was gone and I was too tired to call him on the phone. Soon the
whole family would be on a plane back to England, clinging desperately to
each other and too exhausted to sleep for more than two or three or four
minutes at a time--like survivors of some terrible shipwreck, only half
understanding what had happened to them, disturbing the other passengers
with sporadic moans and cries, finally sedated by the stewardess.

Life is slow on the Kona Coast these days. The fish still feed and

the sun still shines and the wind still blows up from Tahiti.....

But there is a new kind of stillness in the air, which has nothing to do
with the weather. Bad angst is rampant. People are jumping ship. The whole
coast is for sale, and even the wild and beautiful Chang sisters are
talking about a move to the mainland. The Kona Boom has gone bust, for a
while, and the skimmers are pulling out.

Nothing I say will change their minds. People like me here, but they are
reluctant to trust my judgment.

So I spend my nights on the balcony of 505, the Queen Kalama Suite in the
King Kamehameha Hotel, which has a view of everything--the whole Kona
waterfront, Mo snowcapped volcanos, and especially the municipal pier on
Kailua Bay, where the action never stops.

I like it up here. I am cultivating a taste for the balcony life. The bill
is still in Ralph's name, but no matter. The management will cover it.
They have made themselves legally responsible for all problems involving
Ralph's dog, which is still under international quarantine. It went mad in
the kennel from fleas while under the personal supervision of the hotel
veterinarian, and now they are legally responsible. Not only for Rupert
but also for any brain damage, swelling, blindness, missed deadlines, loss
of income and any other grief, pain or mental anguish resulting from my
being stung in the eye by a wasp at the poolside bar. The creature flew
into my face and got trapped behind my sunglasses, then it stung me three
times in the eye socket. My head swelled up dangerously and all they gave
me to cure it was a filthy sock full of ice, which hurt far worse than the
sting. And when I asked for help they referred me to Doctor Ho, a "large
animal" vet.

In any case, they have me on their hands now. I control the high ground,
as it were, and I refuse to check out until we reach a settlement.

I have hired a Korean lawyer from Honolulu to negotiate my claim, which is
huge . . . and in the meantime I have learned to enjoy this hotel, which
is not a bad place to live. There are many fine shops downstairs, and
three bars. There is also a big blue pool down below to my right, the
Hulihee Palace on the waterfront to my  o left across the bay, and thick
green lawns running out along the seawall to the House of  Lono and the
funeral site of Kamehameha

othe Great.

He died down there in a thatch-roof hut under the royal palm trees on the
eighth day of May, 1819, at the age of 61. His body was burned in a
firepit and his bones were buried in a secret cave by his main kahunas,
who never disclosed the site. King Kam has many monuments in Hawaii, but
no tombstone. The same kahunas who buried his bones also ate his heart,
for the power that was in it--just as Kamehameha himself once fed on the
heart of Captain Cook.

KICKING ASS IN KONA

At the end of the Kailua Municipal Pier is a huge set of scales,
maintained by the Japs from the local icehouse who routinely buy every
fish brought into the harbor and send it off to Tokyo, to be chopped up
into sushimi, then refrozen and sent back to Los Angeles. Sushimi is big
business all over the Pacific, and Japanese fish brokers control most of
it.

A license to run sushimi out of Hawaii is better than having a slot
machine concession in the Las Vegas airport. There is always more demand
for sushimi than the market-fisherman can supply. The only thing that
varies is the price--which ranges from five and sometimes ten dollars a
pound at Christmas, down to twenty cents a pound at the peak of the
sport-fishing season, which runs from May to September on the Kona Coast
and yields between five and ten thousand pounds of sushimi for the market
every day.

Ahi, the big yellowfin tuna, is not a real crowd-pleaser on the pier; but
it sells for a lot more money. Ahi is sushimi--in LA and New York, as well
as Tokyo--and in the weeks before Christmas when demand is running high,
the dockside price for a big ahi in Kona can run up to five and sometimes
ten dollars a pound.

Usually it is down around a dollar, which makes it a nice fish to come in
with. But ahi is not the glamorous fish in Kona. This place is famous for
marlin. Big marlin. And that's what the crowd on the pier wants to see.
Any boat flying the traditional dark blue marlin flag on its fantail will
change the mood of the crowd very suddenly.

The Kona Coast is the fishing capital of Hawaii, Kailua Bay is the social
and commercial axis of the Kona Coast; and the huge gallows-like rig of
fish-weight scales on the pier in front of the King Kam Hotel is where the
fishing pros of Kona live or die every afternoon of the week--in full view
of the public, such as it is.

Sport fishing is big business in Kona, and four o'clock on any afternoon
at the end of the city pier is showtime for the local charter captains.
That is where they bring their fish in to be weighed, and to have their
pictures taken if they're bringing in anything big. The big scales at the
end of the pier are where the victors show their stuff, and the vanquished
don't even show up. The boats with no blood on their decks don't even come
in to the pier; they take the short way home--to the harbor,

eight miles north, and those last few miles in from the buoy can be a long
and surly ride for a skipper with a boatload of clients who paid $500 a
day to catch nothing at all. The Honokohau at sundown is not a happy place
to be. As each boatload of failures ties up, the harbor curs rush to the
edge of the black lava cliff that looks down on the dock and start
barking. They want the leftover lunch meat, not fish, and it is an ugly
scene to confront at the end of a long day of failure at sea.

On any given day most boats will go back to the Honokohau. But the few
return to the pier, where the scene is entirely diffe'rent--especially on
a "hot day," when half the town has already been alerted by triumphant
radio calls from far out at sea to prepare the scales for serious action
when the fleet comes in.

The crowd will begin gathering on the end of the pier around three. Jimmy
Sloan, the commercial photographer who has the pier concession, will be
there with his camera to make the moment live in history on 8 x 10
glossies at $10 each. And there will also be the man from Grey's
taxidermy, just in case you want your trophy mounted.

And if you don't, the little blue Datsun pickup from the Jap icehouse is
there to haul it off for cash. Marlin goes cheap: twenty-five cents a
pound, because only the Japs will eat it and the main market is in Tokyo,
over three thousand miles away.

The boys who run the scales almost always know what is coming in, but they
don't know when . . . which makes them act nervous, as four o'clock rolls
around. Any skipper who has already reported a big fish on board will be
in by dark, which doesn't leave much time.

The crowd knows this too. Rumors spread and tourists begin loading
cameras. The boats will come in from the west, directly out of the sunset.
On a calm day in summer you can stand on the end of the pier and see a
boat coming from ten miles out at sea. At first it is just a white spot on
the horizon.. . . Then a small glint of sunlight, reflected off the
highest point of the steel tuna tower.... And soon the white spot of a
roostertail of white spray churned up in the[i] wake of a fast-approaching
hull.

Soon the boat is close enough for people with good binoculars to see the
color of the flag the boat is flying on the outrigger pole. The blue
stands out better against a background of reddening Pacific sky than the
white flag of the ahi--and it will get the crowd moving toward the scales
a lot faster, when the first cry of "blue" goes up.

Every successful charter boat captain understands the difference between
the Fishing Business and Show Business. Fishing is what happens out there
on the deep blue water, and the other is getting strangers to pay for it.
So when you come swooping into Kailua Bay at sunset with a big fish to
hang up on the scales, you want to do it slowly. Ease into the bay in a
long graceful arc, against a background of sailboats and volcanos, then
back your boat down on the pier with every ounce of style and
slow-rumbling boat-handling drama that you and your crew can muster.

The skipper is up on the flying bridge, facing the crowd and controlling
the boat with both hands behind his back on the wheel and throttle. His
deckhand and the clients will be standing down below on the stern, also
facing the crowd and trying not to do anything wrong or awkward in these
last crucial moments, as the boat backs slowly up to the scales and the
chain-hoist swings out to pick up their fish.

Most of the "anglers" who have paid for the privilege of fishing for the
big ones with the big boys in the world-record waters off Kona don't give
a hoot in hell what happens to whatever fish they've caught, once they've
had their pictures taken standing next to the beast as it hangs by its
tail from the steel gallows on the end of the pier. The Bringing in of the
Fish is the only action in town at that hour of the day--or any other
hour, for that matter; because big-time fishing is what the Kona Coast is
all about (never mind these rumors about marijuana crops and bizarre real
estate scams).

Kicking ass in Kona means rumbling into the harbor and up to the scales at
sunset with a Big Fish, not three or four small ones, and the crowd on the
pier understands this. They will laugh out loud at anything that can be
lifted out of a boat by anything less than a crane.

There is a definite blood-lust in the air around the scales at sundown. By
five the crowd is drunk and ugiy. People on their first vacation out of
Pittsburgh are standing around on the pier and talking like jaded experts
about fish the size of the compact cars they just rented out at the
airport.

"How big is that thing, Henry?"

"It's real big, dear. The sign on the scale says one-twenty-two, but
that's probably just the head. The body looks about the size of a cow; I'd
guess about a thousand."

The action around the scales on the pier in Kailua Bay at sundown is
serious drama, and the tension picks up as each new boat comes in. By five
o'clock on a good day they are yelling for thousand-pounders, and woe to
the local charter captain who shows up with anything small.

But there is no escape from the judgment of the crowd, because even a
100-pound ahi can be sold off to the icehouse Japs for $2.78 a pound in
June--enough to pay off the whole day's fuel and cruising costs--and the
price of not bringing it into the scales for the crowd to see and the Japs
to buy is too high for any serious skipper to pay. They charge a lot of
money for services rendered, and one of these services is getting their
clients photographed on the pier with any fish they caught-- even a fine
little 90-pound marlin that might have almost torn the arms off the person
who caught it and that everybody on the boat has been telling him--right
up to that moment of truth on the scales--"must be at least five hundred."

All fish look huge when they jump 20 feet straight up in the air on the
end of your line and 200 yards aft of the boat. And a hundred pounds feels
like a million, after you've fought it for two or three hours; and, for
$500 a day, most clients have already fallen in love with the thing
anyway, by the time they reel it in.

They want that 8x10 color photograph that comes with bringing it into the
pier and having it hoisted up on the gallows in full view of the whole
crowd, for good or ill. The only thing worse than coming in with a "rat"
is coming in with nothing at all.

*******

James King was equally troubled. He had been the first of the shore party
to learn of the theft of the cutter. He had been hailed by Burney as he
was rowed close by the Discovery en route to the Resolution. Clerke had
just returned to his ship, and King arrived on board at the critical
moment when Cook had decided on the more positive and dangerous action.

When King began to recount the details of the previous evening's
occurrences, Cook had interrupted him "with some eagerness," as King
reported. "It is my intention, Mr. King," Cook had announced grimly, "to
bring on board and detain the king and some of the chiefs as hostages
against the return of the cutter." Cook completed to his satisfaction the
loading of his musket. "Your business is to quiet the minds of the indians
on your side of the bay. Inform them that they will not be hurt. And, Mr.
King, keep your party together and on their guard."

King stepped into his boat just before his captain embarked in the
pinnace. He watched the pinnace, escorted by Williamson in the launch and
Lanyon in the small cutter, proceed north from the Resolution towards the
landing place at Kaawaloa. King landed on the beach by the heiau and was
met by Bayly, who was anxiously awaiting news. The hostile murmur was
scarcely audible here, being carried away on the easterly wind. But there
was an atmosphere of tense expectation among the marines, carpenters,
sailmakers and others in the encampment, as well as among the natives who
stood about uneasily.

Several canoes had been launched, including one under the command of that
important and vigorous Chief Kalirnu, but had been deterred from paddling
far out into the bay by the fate of the canoe from Kaawaloa. King
remembered Cook's last words, ordered Ledyard to post his men with muskets
loaded with ball, and to open fire under provocation, and then proceeded
to High Priest Koa's house.

Koa and his priests were in a nervous condition. "I explained to them, as
well as I could, the object of the hostile preparations," King wrote in
his report. "I found that they had already heard of the cutter's being
stolen, and I assured them that though Captain Cook was resolved to
recover it, and to punish the authors of the theft, yet that they and the
people of the village on our side need not be under the smallest
apprehension of suffering any evil from us."

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

****************

FUCK YOU, I'M RICH

Ralph's tragic and unexpected departure from the islands had left me with
a swarm of odd problems, some of them far more serious than v i the fate
of Sadie's dog. Half of Ackerman's marijuana

r crop had been ripped off sometime during the night when he was on the
boat with us at South Point, by cops or somebody else. Either way, he
said, it was time to harvest the rest of it and get out of town for a
while. "They'll be back, for sure," he said, "and if it was the cops
they'll have a warrant next time. I have to yank it now. We're talking
about two hundred thousand dollars."

There was also the problem of Mr. Heem, the realtor, who wanted the rent
for the compound--at least two thousand in cash, and questions would
certainly be raised about the crust of red scum on the property. Once it
hardened, only an industrial sandblaster could get it off.

I liked the color, myself. It brought back oriental memories. There was a
strange red glow on the whole property in the afternoon hours. I drove
past it a few times and noticed that even the grass on the lawn seemed to
glitter. The swimming poo! appeared to be hill of blood, on some days, and
the dense green foliage on the lemon trees seemed about to burst into
flame. The place had a different look now, an air of mystery and magic.
Strange and powerful things had happened here. And perhaps they would
happen again. There was a certain beauty to it, but the effect was very
unsettling and I could see where Heem might have trouble renting it to
decent people.

"Pay him off and don't argue," Ackerman advised. "Two thousand is cheap to
get rid of swine like Heem. He can cause you a lot of trouble. A lawsuit
could drag on for years."

Heem was a powerful figure in local politics. He had once been the
president of the Kona Real Estate Board, but a scandal caused him to quit.
"He was selling nonexistent condos to pension funds," Ackerman explained.
"Xeroxing deeds in triplicate, stealing from old people. Jesus, half the
dead construction projects on this island are Heem's work. He's so crooked
that he has to screw his pants on every morning, but he's rich and he
keeps gangs of lawyers on retainer to put people like you in Hilo Prison."

I agreed that it would be a far far better thing to pay Mr. Heem off at
once, but I didn't have the money. I had given him two thousand up front,
and the rest of the debt was Ralph's.

"Good luck," said Ackerman. "We're both in trouble now. Our

only hope is the crop. All I have to do is put it in garbage bags and get
it to the airport."

"Why not?" I said.

It made no sense at all, but my mood was getting loose and my fianc6e had
gone off to China for a few weeks, leaving me alone in a weird situation.
I relaxed on Ackerman's deck with a thermos of margaritas while he
supervised the last few hours of the harvest, and came up with a foolproof
plan. He was talking about a lot more than two hundred thousand dollars.
It was more like a million. We would bag the whole crop and mail it to a
post office box in rural Texas, where a man who'd once cheated me
maintained an abandoned ranch. A load like that, I figured, would attract
either a massive amount of attention or none at all, and I could live with
it either way. If we got there in two weeks and found people hanging from
telephone poles, we would know not to go to the post office. But if the
coast was clear, we'd be rich. I knew people in Houston who would pay a
hundred thousand just for the rights to pick it up. There are people who
wait all their lives for one chance to do something like that:

"Howdy. I'm DeLorean, new foreman at the Triple Six. Any mail for me?"

The next few seconds are the ones people pay for, a high wild rush in the
nerve ends and your whole life hanging. Whatever happens next will be
serious. There is nothing in Vegas or even drugs that comes close to that
kind of high, they say. There are only two ways to leave a post office in
east Texas, once you've signed for a hundred Primo beer crates filled with
Hawaiian marijuana. Some people get ambushed by G-men, hauled off in
chains or gunned down in a public shootout, and others buy stamps or read
the WANTED posters while the hired hands load up the truck, under the
watchful eyes of the postmaster.

Ackerman said the risk seemed acceptable to him, so we drove down the
mountain to the King Kam Hotel and checked in. Ralph had made all the
proper arrangements for the care of his dog, but he hadn't mentioned
keepers and the desk clerk was nervous when I said we'd be moving into Mr.
Steadman's suite for the duration of the crisis. I had already spoken to
the hotel doctor, who said he'd been drinking when he signed a statement
of Medical Responsibility for the animal and now regretted it. "This is
not your normal pot dog," he told me. "It's a monster chow of some kind.
When I weighed it today it was five pounds heavier than it was yesterday.
The body is growing like a mushroom but the whole central nervous system
is gone."

"Don't worry," I said. "I raised the beast from a puppy. It was my
Christmas present to Mr. Steadman's daughter."

"Ye gods," he muttered. "What did she give you?"

"Nothing half as valuable as Rupert," I said.J'This dog will sire a whole
line when we get him to England."

"That's a horrible thought," said the doctor. "If I had a dog like this,
I'd have it put to sleep."

"The decision is out of our hands," I said. "Mr. Steadman has left his
instructions. Our job is to carry them out."

The doctor agreed. And so did the desk clerk, but some of the details
eluded him. "Somebody's going to have to sign for this," he said, "and it
can't be the dog." He looked down at the bill in his hands. "Who is
'Rupert'?" he asked. "That's the only billing signature I can authorize."

Who indeed? I thought. I stared intently at the bridge of his nose. Rupert
was the dog's name, but I knew the clerk wouldn't stand for it. Ackerman
was out in the parking lot with ten garbage bags of raw marijuana, ready
to load it onto the elevator and up to Ralph's room on a dolly. There was
no going back now. "Don't worry," I said. "Mr. Rupert will be here soon.
He'll sign whatever you want."

Just then Ackerman appeared in the lobby, gesturing angrily as he came
toward the desk. "Ah ha," I said, "Mr. Rupert." He looked puzzled.

"You'll have to sign," I said. "The dog is too sick."

"Of course," he replied, "I have the cure for the poor beast right here."
He reached into his shopping bag and brought out a handful of red and
yellow flea collars--Alii colors. The clerk's voice took a different tone.

"Ah yes ... the dog. I remember now. Of course. Dr. Ho was very concerned.
The animal in 505." He checked the computer. "And also 506," he said
quickly, with a hint of bad nerves in his voice.

"What?" I said.

"That animal should be put to sleep!" the clerk yelled suddenly. "He's
covered with millions of red fleas! We can't even go in those rooms, much
less rent them out! That stinking animal is costing us three hundred
dollars a day!"

"I know," said Ackerman. "I have to live with the poor brute. Mr. Steadman
made me swear, just before he went back to London. He wants that dog on a
plane just as soon as it s fit to travel."

"Rupert is our responsibility now," I said to the clerk. All

of us."

"Rupert?" said the clerk.

"Never mind," Ackerman snapped. "Dr. Ho has arranged for special care.
Don't worry about the cost. Money means nothing to Mr. Steadman."

"That's right," I said. "He's the richest artist in England."

The clerk nodded respectfully. . . .

"And we're the ones who made him that way. ..." I pulled Ackerman up to
the counter.

"This is Mr. Rupert," I said. "Mr. Steadman's personal manager. He'll
handle any red tape."

Ackerman smiled warmly and extended his hand, which was still a faded blue
color. The clerk hesitated, clearly disturbed by the corpse-like
coloration of Mr. Rupert's flesh ... but there was blond hair on the arm,
and it was wearing a gold Rolex. The clerk's eyes were wary but I saw his
nerves relaxing. We were clearly people of substance, despite fits of
eccentric behavior.

"My pleasure, Mr. Rupert," he said, reaching out to shake Ackerman's hand.
"We'll help you in every way."

"Thank you," said Ackerman. "We'll have a real tragedy on our hands if
this animal can't be cured."

"Don't worry," said the clerk. "Dr. Ho is highly respected. That's why we
chose him to be the hotel physician."

"Indeed," I said. "He's still treating my infection from the wasp stings."

The clerk nodded blankly, then reached under the counter for an American
Express form, which he preferred discreetly to Ackerman. "Now if you'll
just sign this," he said.

Ackerman scrawled quickly on the form and accepted two keys from the
clerk.

"505 was Mr. Steadman's room," the man said. "But we've opened the
connecting doors to 506--so now you have the whole Queen Kalama suite,
with a wet bar and all the room you need for that filthy dog."

We thanked him and walked away toward the elevators, but he called after
us: "You understand, of course, that the entire Queen Kalama suite is off
limits to hotel personnel."

Ackerman stopped in mid-stride, then turned slowly around on his heels
like a robot, not smiling this time.

"What do you mean--off limits?"

The clerk was shuffling again. "Well ... ah ... I think it's a medical
problem, Mr. Rupert. Red fleas are a health hazard. We can't have our
employees exposed to infectious disease." He was getting excited again.
"Those goddamn things carry germs!" he shouted. "Red fleas are worse than
rats! They carry smallpox! They carry cholera! They carry syphilis!" What
about our room service?" I asked.

The clerk hesitated. His eyes were not focused. "Room service?" he echoed.
"Ah yes . .. well ... ah ... don't worry about room service. That's no
problem at all, Mr. Rupert. You'll have all the room service you
need--we'll just have to leave everything outside the door." He nodded
happily, clearly pleased with his own quick thinking. "That's right," he
went on, "the rooms are off limits; but the hallway, of course, is not--so
I'll simply advise our room service people never to enter your rooms, for
any reason. They can bring anything you want to your doorway, but not
across the threshold--is that all right?"

Ackerman nodded thoughtfully, as if pondering grave medical

implications___Then he smiled at the clerk and said, "Of course.

That's our only solution, isn't it? We'll do business at the door--no
risk, no responsibility."

******

They led Cook and Phillips straight to Terreeoboo's house, a thatched hut
built without ostentation or decoration and little larger than its
neighbours. The two officers waited outside for the king to appear, and
when he failed to do so after some minutes, Cook said, "Would you please
investigate, Mr. Phillips. It would not be suitable for me to do so, and I
doubt the old gentleman's being inside."

Phillips ducked into the house. "I found the old g'entleman just awoke
from sleep," said Phillips later. He then told the king that Cook was
outside and wished to see him. Slowly, hesitantly, because of his age and
condition, the king arose and put on a cloak. Phillips helped him outside,
where Terreeoboo showed every sign of pleasure at seeing god Lono, and
betrayed no evidence of guilt. .. .

[Cook] turned to Phillips and said in English, "He is quite innocent of
what has happened, of that I am convinced." Then he asked the king in
Polynesian if he would come on board the Resolution with him. King
Terreeoboo at once agreed and got to his feet again, with the aid of a son
at each elbow, and the party began the walk to the shore. .. .

Events now moved forward at an accelerating rate towards a disaster for
which only Cook himself appeared unprepared. His first reaction to the
detention of the king was one of anger--a fierce outburst which neither
the king nor his wife had ever witnessed before. The king himself had in
fact suddenly become a pathetic and un-regal figure--"dejected and
frightened" were the words Phillips used.

At the same time the news of the death of Chief Kalimu off Waipunaula
arrived with the four canoeists who had witnessed the shooting, and spread
with the speed of sound through this emotionally charged gathering. They
closed in, two or three thousand already, the sound that had once been
like a distant murmur now rapidly growing in volume and undisguised
hostility, and with a new sharpness now added to it--the mournful shriek
of conch-shells being blown. Even Cook could no longer disregard the great
press of numbers about them, and their menacing mood. Not one of them even
the nearest, was now prostrated. On the contrary, they were waving clubs
and spears, and some of them held high the newly-acquired and prized
pahoas from the ships' forges, some with blades as long as 20 inches.

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

****************

It sounded very precise, and the clerk nodded eagerly.

So did I, as we moved once again toward the elevators. "A basic canon of
all English-speaking jurisprudence," I muttered. "Nobody would argue with
that logic!"

"Right," said Ackerman. "Oxford Law, one of the first things they taught
us."

"Very clean," I replied. "Very legal--Mr. Steadman would want it that
way."

Ackerman shrugged. "We'll see," he said quietly. "We could run up a hell
of a bill before this thing is over--maybe five hundred dollars a day with
room service and doctors. Hell, I just laid out forty-eight dollars in
cash for these flea collars. We should have put them on Steadman's
plastic."

"How many did you get?" I asked as we stepped into the elevator.

"Two dozen," he said. "Twelve for you and twelve for me. We can wear six
on each arm, like bracelets."

"That's good thinking," I said.

The elevator door opened and we stepped inside.

"What name did you sign?" I asked him.

"Rupert," he said.

"That's all?"

"Yeah, but I put a lot of long swirls in it, plenty of old English
filigree." He shrugged. "What the hell? It's a dog's signature anyway. My
name's not Rupert.

"It is now," I said. "You are Mr. Rupert and the first time  you forget it
we'll be in Hilo Prison for defrauding an innkeeper. That's a felony."

He nodded, turning the key in the lock of 506. "Okay," he said finally.
"You're right. That dog just got a new name--what is it?"

"Homer," I said. "The dog's name is Homer. I'll have Dr. Ho put it on some
kind of affidavit."

"That's right," he said. "Those bastards down at the desk don't care what
our names are, anyway. They'll give us whatever we want if Ralph's plastic
checks out."

"Jesus," he added. "Is Ralph the kind of guy who pays his bills on time?"

"Probably not," I said. "How much time do we need?" "Not much," he
replied. "I can bag the whole crop in three days--and I like that 'off
limits' gig; we won't have to worry about the maids coming in."

I nodded. This was a whole different side of the coin and it worried me.
We could deal, I felt, with the Dog Problem--or even the risk of signing a
young chow's name on Ralph's credit card, but I was not entirely at ease
with Ackerman's plan to use the best suite in the King Kamehameha Hotel,
in the heart of downtown Kona, as a bag-house for his whole marijuana
crop. He wanted to hire a garbage compactor and crush a whole orchard of
marijuana trees into fifty-pound cubes about the size of a TV set.

"How much do you have?" I asked him. "Not much," he said. "Maybe five
hundred pounds." "What?" I said. "Five hundred pounds! That's too much.
They'll smell it. We'll be busted."

"Don't worry," he said. "The whole suite is off limits. They can't cross
the threshold."

"Balls," I said. "They can cross anything they want for five hundred
pounds. The last thing we need right now is a parade of dope dealers in
and out of this place. The whole town would come down on us. It would be a
civic outrage; red fleas are one thing, but . . ."

"Never mind," he said. "I need the fleas. We couldn't ask for a better
cover."

I thought for a moment, then put my worries aside. This was, after all,
Mr. Rupert's suite, not mine--and it was Mr. Rupert who would be signing
all the room service chits. I was only here as a personal favor to my old
friend Steadman, the rich and famous British artist. He had flown back to
London on short notice and left us to care for his dying dog. The beast
was too sick to touch. Its brain had shorted out a long time ago from the
constant plague of red fleas that it had obviously picked up in
Hawaii--perhaps in this very hotel. We had no choice,  as I saw it, and I
knew Dr. Ho would agree.

"Don't worry about that crazy little quack," Ackerman assured me. "He's
the worst coke whore on the island. I've known him for years. He works for
me."

"What? Dr. Ho?"

"Yeah. He has friends in Waikiki. They ship a lot of dog medicine." He
smiled. "And they ship it in real big crates."

Big crates? I thought. Dog medicine? Indeed. Ralph would want it this way.

By the end of the second week at the hotel, it was clear that we needed a
break. The tension was running high. We had been there too long and the
locals were getting nervous. The real estate bund had been worried from
the start about the harmful effects our story' might cause in their
market, and our horrible experience in the Jackpot Tournament had done
nothing to ease their fears.

And neither had we, for that matter. My own mood, in the aftermath of the
fishing tournament, was too foul to hide. Captain Steve was drinking
heavily, Norwood had gone into hiding, the beach thugs were still chasing
Laila, and Ralph's sudden departure for London--leaving, as he did, in a
highly visible wake of shame, failure and public humiliation--was a sure
sign to even our friends that whatever we finally published would not be
good for business.

Which was, after all, the whole point. That had been understood from the
start--although not properly, by some people--and the business of Kona is
business. Specifically, the selling of real estate. There are 600
registered realtors in the Kona Coast alone, and the last thing they need
right now is an outburst of bad publicity in the mainland press. The
market is already so overpriced and overextended that a lot of people are
going to have to go back to fishing for a living, if things don't change
pretty soon. The bull market of the early Seventies is just another
Hawaiian legend now, like the hubris of Captain Cook.

DRIVING THE SADDLE ROAD

When Ackerman got back from Honolulu we decided to lie low for a while.
Even our fishermen friends at Huggo's were getting nervous about why I was
still hanging around, three weeks after Ralph left. The rumors filtering
down--or up, as it were--from the real estate bund were beginning to take
root all around us. I knew we had reached a breakpoint when even the
bartenders at the Kona Inn began saying "I thought you left last week"
every time I came in; or, "What kind of story are you really writing?"

"Never mind," I'd say, "we'll know soon enough." It was my habit, at the
time, to hunker down in the afternoon at the far end of the Kona Inn bar
to read the newspapers and drink cold margaritas while I kept an eye on
the scales across the bay-- just in case I saw signs of a crowd gathering,
which was usually the sign of a big one coming in.

From my perch at the end of the bar, with the big wooden fans whirling
slowly above my head, I could look out on the whole waterfront. It was a
good place to relax and read the papers--with the hula class practicing on
the lawn, tall coconut palms along the seawall, big sailboats out in the
bay and a whole zoo of human weirdness churning quietly all around me.

We were drifting into a macho way of life. There was no doubt about it.
And no help for it, either. We were living with these people, dealing with
them twenty-four hours a day on their own turf--which was usually out at
sea, on their boats, mean-drunk by noon and never feeling quite
comfortable with these tight-lipped seafaring bastards and all their
special knowledge, being always in somebody's way as the goddamn boat
lunges along in the water. ...

Forty thousand feet deep in some places, within sight of the Kona Coast.
Eight miles straight down, like falling off a cliff. It would take a long
time for a body to sink eight miles down to the ocean floor. It is
pitch-black down there, absolute darkness.

Not even sharks swim that deep. But they will probably get you on the way
down, somewhere in that hazy blue level around 300 feet, where the light
begins to fade. Bobbing around on a boat the size of a pickup truck in
40,000 feet of blue water is not a good place to get weird with anybody,
much less the captain of the boat. Or even a deckhand. Nobody at all.

These are the rules. You do what they say, no matter how crazy it seems
even if the captain locks himself in the head below decks at nine o'clock
in the morning with a quart of Wild Turkey while the boat runs in circles
for forty-five minutes and the deckhand has passed out in the fighting
chair with his eyes rolled back in his head like white marbles.

Even then, it is risky to question anything. These people are professional
fishermen, skippers, licensed captains, and they take themselves very
seriously. Words like "macho" and "fascist" take on a whole new meaning
when you lose sight of land. Nothing will turn a man into a nazi any
faster than taking a bunch of ignorant strangers out to sea on his boat,
regardless of how much they pay. It is almost a rule of the sea, with
these charter captains, that "the clients" will panic and do everything
wrong at the first sign of trouble, so that is the way they play it;
marine insurance is hard to get once you've lost a few clients overboard
in water eight miles deep.

"Not one of you swine could get a job in the Caribbean," I said one night
to a table full of professional fishermen on the whiskey deck at Huggo's.
"You couldn't even get work in Florida."

Their reaction was sullen. The mood of the table went sour, and Ackerman
called for the check. It was something like $55, which he paid with his
Merrill-Lynch credit card while the others wandered off to look for
fights.

"It's time to leave," I told him as we pulled out of the parking lot. "I'm
losing my sense of humor." "So are they," he replied.

The traffic was bumper-to-bumper on Alii Drive, jammed up by a crowd of
thugs who had swarmed onto the road to stornp the driver of a motorcycle
that had gone out of control and plowed into a gang of surfers. There were
forty or fifty of them, all crazy on marijuana.

I made a quick U-turn and aimed for the hotel, avoiding the madness
outside. Moments later, from the balcony, we heard the familiar howl of
police sirens.

Ackerman opened a new bottle of scotch and we sat down to watch the
sunset. It was low tide, with no surf, and the melee out on the highway
had cleared the rabble off the beach. It was time, I felt, to relax and
ponder the sea.

Ackerman was smoking heavily. His face had taken on a sort of glazed
appearance that made conversation awkward.

"Well," he said finally, "let's go to the volcano. They'll never look for
us up there." He laughed and suddenly stood up. "That's it," he said.
"We'll make a run for the high ground, maybe run the Saddle Road."

"The Saddle Road?"

"Yeah," he said. "You'll like it. We can go for the record-- one hour and
seventeen minutes from Hilo to Waimea."

"How far?" I said.

"Fifty-three miles, at top speed."

**

When in doubt, bore it out.

--Harley Davidson

**

We were coming into Hilo very fast, running downhill in the rain through a
residential district at just under a hundred miles an hour. The
speedometer went up to 180, but I was not in the mood for unnecessary
risks at this point, so I hit the accelerator and shifted down into second
gear. . . . Ackerman screamed something at me as a tin mailbox suddenly
appeared right in front of us, but I missed it and punched the gas again
as we hit the inside of the curve on a straight bounce and kept going. I
had never driven a Ferrari before and it had taken me a while to get the
hang of it ... but now that I finally felt comfortable with the machine, I
wanted to push it a bit, lean back and let it run. (Any car that costs
$60,000,1 felt, was built for some special purpose--and until now I had
not understood just exactly what this one had been built for, what it
really wanted to do.)

The numbers on the speedometer had fooled me, for a while, into thinking
that the Ferrari 308 was made to go fast. But I was wrong about that. A
lot of cars will go fast, and I have driven

most of them----But I have never driven anything that I would

dare to put through a five-mile stretch of downhill S-turns at 100 miles
an hour in the rain on a two-lane blacktop highway from 10,000 feet above
sea level down to zero in less than ten minutes.

The drop is so steep and so fast that every once in a while, at 100 miles
an hour, you get an eerie sense of freefall. It is almost like flying, or
falling off a cliff. All the outside noise fades away and your eyes feel
big in your head and the focus gets very, very sharp.

We had already broken the record--or at least I thought we

had--but I couldn't be sure and Ackerman had gone rigid in the passenger
seat, no longer keeping track of the stopwatch. He had been yelling
numbers at me every ten or fifteen seconds for almost an hour, but now he
was getting nervous. His eyes were wild and his hands were braced on the
black leather dashboard. I could see that his confidence was slipping.
What he wanted now was a handle, but that was out of the question. We had
left all our handles at the top of the hill, in the shadow of Hilo Prison,
two minutes ahead of the record and miraculously still alive.

Concentrate, I thought. Stay on the fall line, don't touch the brakes, use
the gears and don't blink.. .. This is dangerous, we are almost out of
control.

But not quite, and the car had amazing balance. It was finally on its own
turf, functioning at the top of its form, and I didn't have the heart to
slow it down. Far out in front of us I could see, through the clouds, a
white line of surf hitting up on the rocks around Hilo harbor. It
stretched off in both directions like a line drawn with chalk, the lush
green coast of Hawaii on one side and the deep gray swell of the Pacific
on the other. The bay was full of whitecaps, and no boats were out ... a
bleak Sunday morning in Hilo, the capital city of the Big Island. The
population is mainly Japanese, who tend to sleep in on Sundays, and not
many of whom are good Catholics.

I had already taken this into account, along with other ethnic

factors, when the Speed Run was still in the planning stage----

About six hours ago, in fact, when the bars closed in Kona and Ackerman
let slip that he was planning to leave for a Tuna Tournament in Bimini the
next day, or at least very soon . . . which alarmed me, because I had very
definite plans to use his new yellow Ferrari to set a new land-speed
record for running the Saddle Road.

**

June 4, 1981 Kona

Dear Ralph,

I am hunkered down in my place at Thug Central, watching the sea puppies
out there on the break and running up huge bills while. I postpone my
departure one day at a time and hang out like some

kind of funky Chinook drunkard up here on the balcony waiting for the big
one to strike, like I always knew it would. .. .

And I can almost smell the bastard now, circling out there, just a few
feet away from the hook ... but this time he's acting different; this time
I think he's interested.

Things have changed since you left, Ralph. I shaved my head again, for one
thing. And I also dropped out of sight. .. but not out of mind, at least
not for Captain Steve. I call him constantly, about any problem or even
any random idea that happens into my mind: Hunting wild pigs? Typewriter
ribbons? Deep Diving on acid? Why is the Tanaguchi market out of Dunhills?
Who rents jeeps? How far to the volcano? Where is Pele? How fast can a
white man drive on the Saddle Road at sunset? Why am I here? Who has Da
Kine? Where are the fish? Has Rupert called? Can you cash another check
for two hundred? Why won't Norwood return my calls about sacking the
gravesites? Who was Spaulding's mother? Why can't you get a job?

Usually it is Laila who calls him to ask these questions. Which makes him
doubly nervous, because in his heart he knows it's weird. But he always
returns her calls. And then she calls him back, for more details ... so
they spend a lot of time together, doing business and telling jokes.

And getting things done. Which frees my brain a bit and gives me time to
focus. I type all night and prowl the roads by day, looking for Pele. She
hitchhikes a lot, they say, usually in the form of an old woman. So I do a
lot of driving and I pick up many hitchhikers, especially old women . ..
but age is a hard thing to be sure of at 55 miles an hour; and the lazy
shameful truth is that on any hot afternoon I can be found cruising Alii
Drive in my T-top Mustang picking up women of all ages.

And I grill them, while we drive. Some of them can't handle it: they weep,
they lie, they sing along with the radio and show me their tits, and a lot
of them swear they're in love with me by the time we get to the Kona Surf
parking lot.

That's where I take them, no matter what they say or where they want to
go. I take them all the way out to the end of Alii Drive and down the hill
to that spooky little bay, and all the while I keep offering them a drink
of hot gin out of a pint bottle with no top on it that I keep on the seat
between my legs.

Most of them say they'll do just about anything, just as long as it's not
drinking gin with a 200-pound bald psycho in an open car at high noon on
Alii Drive or in the Kona Surf parking lot. Which is where I always dump
them. Except for the ones who drink gin .. .

OK

H.S.T.

A DOG TOOK MY PLACE

June 10, 1981 Kona

Dear Ralph,

Okay ... Things are really different now. It took a bit longer than I
figured, but I think the Kona nut is finally cracked. About six hours
after I finished the last draft on driving the Saddle Road, I was sitting
in the fighting chair on a boat called the Humdinger and locked into a
desperate struggle with a huge fish--and 17 minutes later I had it reeled
up so close to the boat that I was able to reach out and shatter its brain
with one crazed swooping blow from the Great Samoan war club.

Nobody patronizes me anymore, Ralph. I can drink with the fishermen now.
The big boys. We gather at Huggo's around sundown, to trade lies and drink
slammers and sing wild songs about Scurvey. I am one of them now. On the
night we caught the big fish I was "cut off' at Huggo's, and last night I
was 86'd from the Kona Inn. for kicking the owner in the nuts, for no good
reason at all. The last thing he said--after inviting us for dinner and
picking up the tab for $276--was "Why did you do this to me?" Then his
eyes rolled back in his head and he sank down with a terrible groan on
that black-rock ledge in the entranceway, where he stayed for an hour and
a half and said nothing at all to anybody.

That's what I heard today, when I called to find out if he'd received the
roses I sent, by way of apology.. . . Yeah, it was that bad. It was the
first time in my life that I ever sent a dozen red roses to a man.

The boys at Huggo's went wild when they heard the story. They laughed like
loons and slapped me all over my back, and even restored my bar
privileges. They don't like Mardian--the man I kicked in the nuts--because
one of the first things he did after buying the Kona Inn was to walk into
Huggo's, where the fishermen drink, and say he was going to put the place
out of business in six months, and anybody who didn't like it could suck
on his black belt.

He is very serious about his karate, and he will probably kick my head off
my body the next time I go in there to drink.. .. But I like those fine
margaritas at sunset, Ralph, and the Kona Inn is the only place in town
that will cash my checks for cash.

So much for that, eh? I think it's time to leave.

But before I go I want to tell you a fish story. The working title is "How
to Catch Big Marlin in Deep Water," but I might want to call it something
else by the time we go to  press.

This is a weird story, 'Ralph. It has been weird from  the start and it
becomes relentlessly weirder with every passing day. They can't understand
why I'm still here. And neither can I, for that matter--except that it
seemed to be working, despite the brutal expenses.

And they are brutal. Unless this book is a best seller I will have to get
a job out here as either a charter-boat captain or a real estate agent, or
maybe even both. That would give me a foothold of sorts--but not for real,
and certainly not for long.

I could handle the fishing end, but .the  real estate market in Kona is so
wretched these days that I could own every building on  Alii  Drive and
still go bankrupt-by Christmas. The whole coast, is for sale  to the
highest bidder--or to any bidder at all, for that matter.  Nobody is
buying  anything for more than a dime on the dollar. There are 600 real
estate agents in Kona, and between them they  have  made only fifty (50)
escrow closures since you left here in early January, six months ago.

That is not what you call a bull market.

********************

Then one native broke from the crowd following him, advanced with a club,
withdrew for fear he might turn, advanced again, raised the club and
struck him a fearful blow. Cook staggered for several yards, and fell onto
a hand and knee, his musket rattling onto the rocks beside him.

The captain was clearly not killed by this blow, though seriously stunned.
Another native did the murder. He was recognized by several onlookers. The
muscular Chief Ku'a leapt onto the big stooping form, raised his pahoa,
and plunged it into the back of Cook's neck. Robust to the end, even this
did not kill him. The shock of the blow caused him to fall into a rock
crevice full of water from the high tide. Ku'a leapt onto him again,
stabbing him repeatedly while others who had joined the murderer attempted
to hold him down under the water. In one last gesture of defiance, Cook
raised his head. Those in the pinnace saw his big craggy face clearly but
momentarily. His lips were forming an unheard cry and he was waving an arm
feebly towards them. He attempted to rise, received a second fearful club
blow. And now it was all over--all finished except for the dreadful
performance of mutilation.

Henry Roberts from Shoreham, Sussex, master's mate, was among those who
were unwitting eyewitnesses in the pinnace; and the sight would haunt them
all for the remainder of their lives. The natives fell on the corpse like
wolves upon a fallen moose, stabbing it, grabbing another's pahoa and
thrusting it in again, stabbing with spears, too, and hitting it with
rocks and clubs. At one point a number of them raised his body from the
crevice and beat his head repeatedly against the rock face.

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook.

****************

But it is our market, Ralph. The chickens are already roosting here, and
more come home every day. If we have any real cash by Labor Day we can buy
the whole goddamn place, and mete out our own kind of justice.

Right. Yes. And so much for that. It is time to get back to basics. We can
always buy real estate, Ralph. And we can always punish the guilty. ...
But right now I think I should tell you the story of what happened when I
finally caught a fish.

It was, as you know, my first. And it came at an awkward time. I was ready
to leave. We had an eight o'clock flight to Honolulu, then an overnight
haul to LA and Colorado. Fuck these people. Their lies are costing us
money and I was losing my sense of humor.

That was when I decided to have one last talk with the remnants of Team
200: a business meeting, of sorts; ten o'clock sharp at the Yacht
Club--just ask a few critical questions, get the answers on tape, then get
out of town the next day.

But the whole idea went wrong, due to booze, and by midnight my mood had
turned so ugly that I decided--for some genuinely perverse reason--to go
out and fish for marlin once again. It would be my last day in Kona and
the plane didn't leave until eight, so why not?

I was still typing in a fit of cold rage when the sun came up and I
realized that it was time, once again, to drive down to Union Jack Liquors
for another two cases of Heineken, then back in the T-top Mustang for
another high-speed run on the highway out there to the Honokahua and
another long day at sea.

That will tell you all you need to know about my attitude at that point. I
didn't pack that goddamn brutal Samoan war club in my seabag for the
purpose of crushing ice. There is a fearful amount of leverage in that
bugger, and I knew in my heart that by the end of the day I would find a
reason to use it. . . . On something: maybe a fish, or maybe the fighting
chair. There is a lot of mahogany to work with on a thirty-six-foot
Rybovich.

It was almost ten when I came rocketing into the parking lot at something
like sixty in low gear and half out of control in a serious four-wheel
drift. I missed that bumed-out hulk that once belonged to Lee Marvin by
six feet or so, then straightened it out and aimed the front wheels at the
big tuna tower of the Humdinger. 1 could see Steve's blue El Camino parked
right on the edge of the cliff above the boat.. ..

They heard me coming, they said later, but there was nowhere to run except
up to the front of the boat or into the water. So they ran. But not soon
enough. The next sound they heard was my brakes locking up and the awful
roar of tires skidding sideways on gravel. . . and then a sharp metallic
bang as my front bumper nicked the rear of the El Camino just hard enough
to make it leap about three feet straight forward, so quick that it looked
like a frog jumping.

The whole thing happened in milliseconds, so fast that it seemed like a
dream. No damage, no problem .. . but when I walked out to the edge of the
cliff with the first case of beer and looked down on them, nobody spoke.
It was like talking to pillars of salt.

"Don't worry," I said, "I have another case in the car."

Still nobody spoke.

Jesus, I thought. These bastards are drunk.

Then I realized that they were not looking at me, but at the front bumper
of Steve's El Camino, which was very close to the edge. From where they
stood, it looked almost ready to fall straight down

on the boat, which would mean certain death for all three of them--either
crushed by the falling car, pinned in the wreckage and drowned as the boat
sank, or burned alive in a holocaust of flaming gasoline and exploding
diesel tanks that would probably destroy the whole harbor and burn out of
control for three days.

These things happen. .. . Yeah, and let's jump this one forward a bit and
pick up the story.

We had the fish in the boat by noon. My time was 16 minutes and 55 seconds
on the line, and another five seconds to whack it stone dead with the
club. The beast fought savagely. It was in the air about half the time I
was fighting it. The first leap came about ten seconds after I clipped
myself into the chair, a wild burst of white spray and bright green flesh
about 300 yards behind the boat, and the second one almost jerked my arms
off. These buggers are strong, Ralph, and they have an evil sense of
timing that can break a man's spirit. Just about the time your arms go
numb they will rest for two or three seconds--and then, in that same split
second when your muscles begin to relax, they will take off in some other
direction like something shot out of a missile-launcher.

It is not like fishing for trout. What we are talking about here is a
beast the size of a donkey that is fighting for its life on its own turf.
A ten-pound trout might put up an elegant fight, but a 300-pound marlin
with a hook in its throat can rip your arm-bones right out of their
sockets, then leap right into the boat and snap your spine like a
toothpick. The marlin is a very mean fish, and if it ever develops a taste
for human flesh we will all be in trouble. People who fish for blue marlin
don't even consider big sharks like the mako and the hammerhead a sporting
proposition.

Most sharks won't even put up a fight. You can reel a big hammerhead right
up next to the boat in ten or fifteen minutes. No problem.

Until you get to that sixteenth minute. That is when the real fun starts,
with a hammerhead. They are harder to kill than most Buicks, and getting,
one into the boat without killing half the crew is a trick that very few
marlin fishermen will ever want to learn. But that is a different story,
Ralph, and right now I'm not in the mood for it. People who fish for big
sharks usually do it at night, for their own reasons. Some people want to
catch fish, and others want to kill them.

Sharks are not hated and feared in Hawaii like they are in the Caribbean.
These Kanakas spend half their time in the water, but you never see
anything in the newspapers about "shark attacks." Not even the deep coral
divers seem to worry much about sharks, except at night, when they tend to
get hungry--and I have never-heard a surfer even say the word "shark."

Which could mean nothing at all, as you know. They are not big on words,
and they rarely even talk to each other. But anybody who spends twelve
hours a day thrashing around in the surf like a bait-fish is either
half-shark himself or knows something about them that we don't.

And it occurs to me, now that I think on it, that they don't even worry
me. Which is dumb, because I know the bastards are down there. I have seen
them up close, in the waters off the Keys . .. and now that I've said
this, the taboo is broken and the next time I go down with a tank anywhere
in Hawaii some blood-hungry rogue mako will probably rip both of my legs
off.

OK  H.S.T.

**************************

High Priest Koa had been told that he was not to return to the ship
without the body of Cook. Several days passed before he fulfilled his
promise. From accounts provided by the girls, it appeared that King
Terreeoboo and his family and entourage of chiefs had retired to some
caves high up in the clifftops. There, the captain's corpse had been
shared out among the highest chiefs, the hair to one, the scalp to
another, the skull to a third, the hands to another--and the lion's share,
so to speak, being retained by Terreeoboo. High Priest 'Bretannee' Koa's
difficult task was to extract these prized parts from the chiefs, and
arrange for their return in one parcel.

It was not until 19 February that Priest Hiapo sent a message that the
body was on shore and awaited collection. Clerke in his pinnace and King
in the cutter put off from the Resolution, and under strong guard
approached the shore at Kaawaloa. Beneath flags of peace, a party of
priests and chiefs in solemn and ceremonial state paraded on shore with a
massive pile of fruit and hogs from the king. . . . Priest Hiapo carried
in his hands a large parcel wrapped in plaintain leaves and covered with a
mourning cloak of black and white feathers.

'On opening it,' wrote King, 'we found the captain's hands, the scalp, the
skull, wanting the lower jaw, thigh bones and arm bones.' The hands had
been pierced and salt rammed in to preserve them.

(continues)

King Terreeoboo himself at last made a reappearance after receiving
assurances that he and his family would be safe and that the quarrel
[would be] buried along with the body of the old god Lono. Clerke was able
to receive him briefly.

Tears were falling from the bloodshot eyes of the king as he begged to
know if they would be friends again when they returned to leave behind, as
promised, Lieutenant King, the new god Lono. Clerke reassured him, and as
he wrote later, 'he expressed great satisfaction and appeared very happy.'

'And when will Lono return?' asked Terreeoboo.

Lieutenant King replied that he would return before long.

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook.

****************

WE KILLED LIKE CHAMPIONS

June 21, 1981 Kona

Dear Ralph,

Yes .. , the fish was looking me straight in the eye when I reached far
out over the side and bashed his brains loose with the Samoan war club. He
died right at the peak of his last leap: one minute he was bright green
and thrashing around in the air with that goddamn spear on his nose trying
to kill everything within

reach. ...

And then I smacked him, Ralph. I had no choice. He went limp with the
first hit, about two inches behind the same eye he was using to look at me
. . . and in fact my first instinct was to go for the eye itself, but I
altered my swing at the last split second, because I knew that kind of
hideous mutilation would raise unpleasant questions at the pier.

Anyway, that should answer your question. After 47 days and 47 nights of
dumb shame and futility, that bastard might as well have been blind in
both eyes from birth, for all the mercy he was going to milk out of me
with one final piteous stare. At that point, I'd have bashed the brains
out of a killer whale, if we'd got it up next to the boat. ... A terrible
blood-lust came on me when I saw him leaping right beside the boat, so
close that he almost leaped right into it, and when the captain up on the
bridge started screaming "Get the bat! Get the bat! He's gone wild!" I
sprang out of the goddamn fighting chair and, instead of grabbing that
silly little aluminum baseball bat they normally use to finish off these
beasts with ten or fifteen whacks.. ..

That's when I reached into my kitbag and brought out the war club and
kicked Steve out of the way and then, with a terrible shriek, I hit the
beast with a running shot that dropped it back into the water like a stone
and caused about sixty seconds of absolute silence in the cockpit.

They weren't ready for it. The last time anybody killed a big marlin in
Hawaii with a short-handled Samoan war club was about three hundred years
ago . .. and let me tell you, King Kam was lucky that fisherman used a
paddle on his head, instead of that thing

I swung on the fish; we might never have had any talk about "Laws of the
splintered etc. . . ."

Anyway, here's a selection of photos. I wish I could send you more, but it
all happened so fast that I had a hell of a time getting any pictures at
all ... 7 not only had to use the business end of a rod and reel for the
first time in my lije to drag a 300-pound monster out of the sea in less
than twenty minutes and then kill it in the midst of a frenzy right in
front of my face, but I also had to rush back into the cabin and get the
camera and shoot a whole roll/pack in less than 30 seconds.

Very fast and savage work, Ralph. You'd have been proud of me.

Indeed . .. but the real story of that high-strung blood-spattered day was
not so much in the catching of the fish (any fool can do that)--but in our
arrival at the pier, which freaked everybody, even Laila.

We came in wild and bellowing, Ralph. They said they could hear me
screaming about a half mile out ... I was shaking the war club at the
drunken bastard Norwood on the pier and cursing every booze-crazy
incompetent son of a pig-fucking missionary bastard that ever set foot in
Hawaii.. .. People cringed and shrunk back in silence, as this terrible
drunken screaming came closer and closer to the pier. . . .

They thought I was screaming at them. Nobody on the pier had any idea that
I was talking (at the top of my lungs) to Norwood-- and the rumbling of
our diesel engines was so loud that it seemed to me that I could barely
make myself heard.

Which was not the case. They could hear me at the bar in the Kona Inn, 500
yards across the bay . . . and to the big afternoon crowd on the pier,
Laila said, it sounded like the second coming ofLono. I raved for fifteen
minutes, the whole time it took us to tie up.. . .

The crowd was horrified, and even Laila tried to act like she didn't know
us when I hurled a 15-pound ahi at her from about 10 yards out. It hit on
the concrete pier with a nasty wet smack, but nobody picked it up, or even
spoke . . . they hated everything we stood for, and when I jumped up on
the pier and began whipping on the fish with the war club, nobody even
smiled.

OK

H.S.T.

YESTERDAY'S WEIRDNESS IS TOMORROW'S REASON WHY

June 30, 1981 City of Refuge

Dear Ralph,

Enclosed please find some pages I did in Kona, along with a photograph
suitable for framing.

Your letter of 24/6 arrived today, along with the book on shark care,
which I suspect we can use. . . . And I also like your notion of the
Cro-Magnon man reemerging on the point of a new Ice Age, both ahead and
behind his time. Which is-a serious trick to pull off, as you know, and it
has given me no end of trouble, in both the personal and the professional
arenas. Few people are comfortable with this concept, and even fewer can
live with it. Thank God I have at least one smart friend like you.

But there is one thing I feel you should know, Ralph, before you take your
theory any further: I am Lono.

Yeah, That's me, Ralph. I am the one they've been waiting for all these
years. Captain Cook was just another drunken sailor who got lucky in the
South Seas.

Or maybe not--and this gets into religion and the realm of the mystic, so
I want you to listen carefully; because you alone might understand the
full and terrible meaning of it.

A quick look back to the origins of this saga will raise, I'm sure, the
same inescapable questions in your mind that it did in mine, for a while.
.. .

Think back on it, Ralph--how did this thing happen? What mix of queer and
(until now) hopelessly confused reasons brought me to Kona in the first
place? What kind of awful power was it that caused me--after years of
refusing all (and even the most lucrative) magazine assignments as cheap
and unworthy--to suddenly agree to cover the Honolulu Marathon for one of
the most obscure magazines in the history of publishing? I could have gone
off with a planeload of reporters to roam the world with Alexander Haig,
or down to Plains for a talk with Jimmy Carter. There were many things to
write, for many people and many dollars--but I spurned them all, until the
strange call came from Hawaii.

And then I persuaded you, Ralph--my smartest friend--to not only come with
me, but to bring your whole family halfway around the world from London,
for no good or rational reason, to spend

what might turn out to be the. weirdest month of our lives on a
treacherous pile of black lava rocks called the Kona Coast . . .

Strange, eh?

But not really. Not when I look back on it all and finally see the pattern
. . . which was not so clearly apparent to me then, as it is now, and
that's why I never mentioned these things to you while you were here. We
had enough problems, as I recall, without having to come face to face with
the Genuinely Weird. Merely getting on and off the island required
thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours; and the simple act of
sending a packet from Kona to Portland, Oregon, was a full-time job for
both of us, for three or four days.

And then, when you left, the massive shame and humiliation I suffered at
the hands of those fools made me both too crazy to talk about what I was
only then beginning to understand was the real reason for it all. . . and
in fact I failed to see it clearly, myself, until last night.

Many things happened after you left, Ralph, and that is why I am writing
you, now, from what appears to be my new home in The City; so make note of
the address:

c/o Kaleokeawe

City of Refuge

Kona Coast, Hawaii

You remember the Kaleokeawe, Ralph--it's the hut where you told me they
were keeping King Kam's bones; the place where you dared to climb over the
wall and pose in the yard for some Polaroid shots, like the buggering fool
you are and always will be. . . . . What?

Did I say that?

Well. . . yeah, I did . . . but never mind these idle jabs, Ralph; you
weren't there when the deal went down.

The trouble began on the day I caught the fish--or, more specifically, it
began when I came into the harbor on the flying bridge of the Humdinger
and started bellowing at the crowd on the dock about "filthy drunken sons
of missionaries" and "lying scum" and "doomed pig-fuckers" and all those
other things I mentioned in my last update letter.

What I didn't tell you, old sport, is that I was also screaming, "I am
Lono!" in a thundering voice that could be heard by every Kanaka on the
whole waterfront, fram the Hilton to the King Kam--and that many of these
people were deeply disturbed by the spectacle.

I don't know what got into me, Ralph--I  didn't mean to say it--at least
not that loud, with all those natives listening. Because

they are superstitious people, as you know, and they take their legends
seriously. Which is understandable, I think, in the minds of people who
still shudder at the memory of what happened when they bungled Lono's last
visit.

It was not surprising, in retrospect, that my King Kong-style arrival in
Kailua Bay on a hot afternoon in the spring of 1981 had a bad effect on
the natives. The word traveled swiftly up and down the coast, and by
nightfall the downtown streets were crowded with people who had come from
as far away as South Point and the Waipio Valley to see for themselves if
the rumor was really true--that Lono had, in fact, returned in the form of
a huge drunken maniac who dragged fish out of the sea with his bare hands
and then beat them to death on the dock with a short-handled Samoan war
club.

By noon the next day these rumors of native unrest had reached our friends
in the real estate bund, who saw it as the "last straw," they said later,
and reached a consensus decision to get me out of town on the next plane.
This news was conveyed to me by Bob Mardian at the bar of the Kona Inn,
which he owns.

"These guys are not kidding," he warned me. "They want to put you in Hilo
Prison." He glanced nervously around the bar to see who was listening,
then grasped my arm firmly and leaned his head close to mine. "This is
serious," he whispered. "I've got three waitresses who won't come to work
until you're gone."

"Gone?" I said. "What do you mean?"

He stared at me for a moment, drumming his fingers on the bar. "Look," he
said finally. "You've gone too far this time. It's not funny anymore.
You're fucking with their religion. The whole town is stirred up. The
realtors had a big meeting today, and they tried to blame it on me."

I called for another brace of margaritas--which Mardian declined, so I
drank them both--while I listened. It was the first time I'd ever seen
Mardian take anything seriously.

"This Lono thing is dangerous," he was saying. "It's the one thing they
really believe in."

I nodded.

"I wasn't here when it happened," he went on, "but it was the first thing
I heard about when I got off the plane--'Lono is back, Lono is back.' " He
laughed nervously. "Jesus, we can get away with almost anything out
here---but not that."

The bar was quiet. People were staring at us. Mardian had obviously been
chosen--by his own people--to deliver an ugly

message.

OK

H.S.T.

****************

July 1, 1981 City of Refuge

(24 hours later) . . . I must be getting old, Ralph, eight pages is about
all I can do in one night; so I took a break and got some sleep. I also
felt I should back off and have a long look at this I am Lono business,
because I was wary of being fooled by another false dawn.

That was the problem, Ralph. We were blind. The story we wanted was right
in front of our eyes from the very start--although we can be excused, I
think, for our failure to instantly understand a truth beyond reality. It
was not an easy thing for me to accept the fact that I was bom 1,700 years
ago in an ocean-going canoe somewhere off the Kona Coast of Hawaii, a
prince of royal Polynesian blood, and lived my first life as King Lono,
ruler of all the islands.

According to our missionary/journalist, William Ellis, I "governed Hawaii
during what may in its chronology be called the Fabulous Age" . . . until
"(I) became offended with my wife, and murdered her; but afterwards
lamented the act so much, as to induce a state of mental derangement. In
this state (I) traveled through all the islands, boxing and wrestling with
everyone (I) met . . . (1} subsequently set sail in a singularly shaped
'magic' canoe for Tahiti, or a foreign country. After (my) departure (I)
was deified by (my) countrymen, and annual games of boxing and wrestling
were instituted in (my) honor."

How's that for roots?^:

What?

Don't argue with me, Ralph. You come from a race of eccentric degenerates;
I was promoting my own fights all over Hawaii fifteen hundred years before
your people even learned to take a bath.

And besides, this is the story. I don't know music, but I have a good ear
for the high white sound . . . and when this Lono gig flashed in front of
my eyes about 33 hours ago, I knew it for what it was.

Suddenly the whole thing made sense. It was like seeing The Green Light
for the first time. I immediately shed all religious and rational
constraints, and embraced a New Truth.

It has made my life strange and I was forced to flee the hotel after the
realtors hired thugs to finish me off. But they killed a local haole.
fisherman instead, by mistake. This is true. On the day before I left,
thugs beat a local fisherman to death and left him either floating
facedown in the harbor, or strangled to death with a brake-cable and left
in a jeep on the street in front of the Hotel Manago. News accounts were
varied. . . .

That's when I got scared and took off for The City. I came down the hill
at ninety miles an hour and drove the car as far as I could out on the
rocks, then I ran like a bastard for the Kaleokeawe-- over the fence like
a big kangaroo, kick doivn the door, then crawl inside and start screaming
"I am Lono" at my pursuers, a gang of hired thugs and realtors, turned
back by native Park Rangers.

They can't touch me now, Ralph. I am in here with a battery-powered
typewriter, two blankets from the King Kam, my miner's headlamp, a kitbag
full of speed and other vitals, and my fine Samoan war club, Laila brings
me food and whiskey twice a day, and the natives send me women. But they
won't come into the hut--for the same reason nobody else will--so I  have
to sneak out at night and fuck them out there on the black rocks.

I like it here. It's not a bad life. I can't leave, because they're
waiting for me out there by the parking lot, but the natives won't let
them come any closer. They killed me once, and they're not about to do it
again.

Because I am Lono, and as long as I stay in The City those lying swine
can't touch me. I want a telephone installed, but Steve won't pay the
deposit until Laila gives him $600 more for bad drugs.

Which is no problem, Ralph; no problem at all. I've already had several
offers for my life story, and every night around sundown I crawl out and
collect all the joints, coins and other strange offerings thrown over the
stakefence by natives and others of my own kind.

So don't worry about me, Ralph. I've got mine. But I would naturally
appreciate a visit, and perhaps a bit of money for the odd expense here
and there.

It's a queer life, for sure, but right now it's all I have. Last night,
around midnight, I heard somebody scratching on the thatch and then a
female voice whispered, "You knew it would be like this."

"That's right.'" I shouted. "I love you!"

There was no reply. Only the sound of this vast and bottomless sea, which
talks to me every night, and makes me smile in my sleep.

RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE EUROMING OF THE LIGHT

Skinner brought me some whiskey last night. He flew over from Honolulu
with two girls from the agency and five or six litres of hot Glenfiddich
Scotch, which we drank on the beach in paper cups with some ice I got from
the Rangers. The moon was dim and the clouds were low, but we had enough
light from my portable hurricane lamp to see each other's faces when we
talked. The girls were not comfortable here, and neither was Skinner. "I'm
sorry," he said later, "but it's too weird to laugh at."

We were sitting on the floor of my house in the City of Refuge, about
thirty miles south of Kailua on the Kona Coast of Hawaii. The girls had
gone swimming in the bay, and from where I sat I could see them splashing
around in the surf, their naked bodies shining in the moonlight.
Occasionally one of them would appear in the small doorway and ask for a
cigarette, then laugh nervously and run away again, leaving us alone to
our baleful conversation.

The sight of these long-legged nymphs prancing around on the black rocks
outside my door made concentration difficult. Skinner could not see the
girls from where he sat, and his rnood was becoming so grim that I tried
not to see them myself. .. . Because I understood that this was not a
social visit, and we didn't have much time.

"Look," he was saying. "We're both in trouble."

I nodded.

"And we will both end up in Hilo Prison if we don't put an end to this
madness--right?"

That got my attention. "Well ... ah ... maybe so," I agreed. "Yeah, you're
probably right; it's Hilo Prison for sure. . . ."

My mind flashed back to realities: fraud, arson, bombs, assault,
conspiracy, harboring fugitives, heresy ... all felony charges.

He shook his head and leaned forward to hand me a cigarette. We were both
sitting cross-legged on the floor, each on our own tapa mat, with the dull
glow of the hurricane lamp like a tiny campfire between us ... and both
our necks bowed with serious problems that could only be solved by serious
men thinking serious thoughts.

A noise outside the hut distracted me and I glanced out the door. One of
the girls was standing high on the rocks with her  hands on her hips and
her nipples pointing up at the moon like some ancient Hawaiian goddess
curling into a swan dive all the way down to the Land of Po . . . and I
was stunned by the sight of it, some elegant vision from a half-remembered
past . .. with the sea lapping up on the rocks and the moon rolling over
toward China.

"Never mind the girls," Skinner snapped. "We can always take them with
us"-- he paused, looking up at me--"if we can ever get you out of this
place."

He was right. I shifted my position on the floor so I wouldn't have to see
the girls, and tried again to focus on what he was telling me. .. .

Sometime around midnight we^1 ran out of ice and I had to use the bullhorn
to call for more. Skinner was worried about waking up the natives across
the bay, but I assured him they were used to it. "They love the bullhorn,"
I explained. "Especially the children. Every once in a while I let one of
them use it."

"That's dumb," Skinner mumbled. "Stay away from children. They'll betray
you by accident. Jesus," he muttered, "a bullhorn! Are you out of your
fucking mind? These natives are nervous enough, as it is. If they decide
you're a pervert, you're finished."

"But I never turn it on," I said, showing him the ON-OFF-VOLUME switch
under a piece of duct tape on the handle. "The little bastards can yell
into it all day and it won't make a sound. But when I use it," I said, "it
sounds like this."

A terrible screech of feedback and distorted low-end rumble filled the
heia.it as I punched the sound level all the way up to 10 watts and aimed
it out the door at the Ranger station back in the palm jungle. The sound
was unbearable. Skinner leaped to his feet and rushed outside to calm the
girls, who were screaming hysterically. . . . But I couldn't hear them
now; their voices were completely blotted out. And then, as thunder
follows lightning came the strange crackling roar of my own voice--saying
very gently and calmly:

"aloha! icecubes,mahalo."

And then, repeated over and over again, like a voice from the Land of Po,
"ICE CUBES, MAHALO, YES, ICE CUBES ... ICE CUBES . . . MAHALO ... ICE
CUBES ... ICE CUBES . . . MAHALO."

The relentless screech of the feedback rose and fell like wild electric
music along with my words, bellowing across the quiet little bay like the
voice of some monster coming out of the sea with a diesel meat-grinder and
a brain from another world.

"ice cubes! to the heiau! mahalo."

I uttered one final wavering burst of oriental gibberish, then tossed the
bullhorn aside as Skinner appeared in the doorway.

his eyes the size of baseballs. "You crazy bastard!" he screamed, "now
we'll never get out of this place!" He grabbed his Hobie seabag off the
floor and began frantically jamming things into it.

"Calm down," I said. "The ice is on its way."

He paid no attention. "Fuck ice," he muttered. "I'm leaving."

"What?" I said, still not understanding his frenzy. He was crawling around
on the floor like an animal frantic in heat.

Then he stood up and waved a sharp stick at me. "Fuck off, dumbo!" he
screamed. "It's Hilo Prison for you! You're not even sane, man! You want
to get us all busted!" He shook his stick at me again, as if to ward off a
demon. "But not me, you bastard! I'm out of here! I never want to see
these goddamn islands again! Or you either. Jesus," he said. "You're worse
than crazy. You're dumb!"

"So what?" I said. "It doesn't matter here."

He stared at me for a moment, then lit a cigarette.

I opened another bottle of Scotch and scraped the rest of the ice out of
the cooler. "We'll have more in a minute." I said.

Which was true. The night ranger--probably my friend Mitch Kamahili---was
even now on his way along the path through the palm trees with a garbage
bag full of ice cubes. In a moment I would see the bright beam of his
flashlight sweeping the bay, and I would signal him back with my own light
. .. and then I would walk carefully across the rocks to the old canoe
beside the main heiau when I knew he would leave the icebag . . . and ,in
its place I would leave my own bag .. . the one from the last night's
delivery--full of empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, dead batteries and
crumpled wads of blue typewriter paper.

This was our nightly routine, and the rangers seemed to enjoy it. All they
asked was that I stay out of sight during the daylight hours when the
tourists were roaming around. That would be a flagrant violation of the
main kapu.

The gravity of the situation had been explained to me more than once by
Mitch, the young ranger who normally worked the graveyard shift. On some
nights--when he was sure I had no visitors--he would bring the ice all the
way out to the heiau and we would sit for a while, and talk about what was
happening.

Or not happening, as he'd been very careful to explain to me. "You are not
here," he told me. "The heiau is kapu. Nobody can be here."

I listened carefully, with all three ears, knowing in my heart that he was
far crazier than I was.

I was dealing, night after night, with a U.S. National Park Ranger in full
uniform who also believed, without question,

that any shark he saw in the bay might be his uncle ... in a different
form, perhaps, but still family.

On some nights, as we sat there on the edge of the sea drinking beakers of
iced malt whiskey and sharing a pipe of the local weed he would suddenly
stand up and say, "See you later, boss. I'm going home for a while."

When he got in these moods, Mitch would roll a huge green cigarette and go
off to sit by himself. I would see the glow of the cigarette for a while,
and then I would hear a splash as he slithered over the side, leaving me
to brood drunkenly in the dim glare of the hurricane lamp, hunched on the
rocks like a stranded ape.

Over the side. Into the deep, blowihg air like a porpoise as he slid away
from the rocks and out to the open sea, disappearing into the ocean with
the atavistic grace of some mammal finally remembering where it really
wanted to be.

****************

The Song of Waahia

O the long knife of the stranger.

Of the stranger from other lands,

Of the stranger with sparkling eyes,

Of the stranger with a white face!

O long knife of Lono, the gift of Lono;

It flashes like fire in the sun;

Its edge is sharper than stone,

Sharper than the hard stone of Hualalai;

The spear touches it and breaks,

The strong warrior sees it and dies!

Where is the long knife of the stranger?

Where is the sacred gift of Lono?

It came to Wailuku and is lost,

It was seen at Lahaina and cannot be found.

He is more than a chief who finds it,

He is a chief of chiefs who possesses it.

Maui cannot spoil his fields,

Hawaii cannot break his nets;

His canoes are safe from Kauai.

The chiefs of Oahu will not oppose him,

The chiefs of Molokai will bend at his feet.

O long knife of the stranger,

O bright knife of Lono!

Who has seen it? Who has found it?

Has it been hidden away in the earth?

Has the great sea swallowed it?

Does the kilo see it among the stars?

Can the kaula find it in the bowels of the black hog?

Will a voice from the anu answer?

Will the priests of Lono speak?

The kilo is silent, the kaula is dumb.

O long knife of the stranger,

O bright knife of Lono,

It is lost, it is lost, it is lost!

****************

The Song of Waahia, A Renowned Prophetess

Waahia lived during the 1200s A.D. Although it is claimed that Waahia was
of chieftain lineage, nothing is positively known, even of her parents.
Through an almost undeviating verification of her prophecies, in lime she
became rioted and feared by the people, not only as a favored devotee of
Uli, the god of the sorcerers, but as a medium through whom the unipihili,
or spirits ot the dead, communicated. She lived alone in a hut in a
retired part of the valley of Waipio, and it is said lhat a large puco, or
owl, which was sacred and sometimes worshipped, came nightly and perched
upon the roof of her lonely habitation.

The Legends and Myths of Hawaii by His Majesty King Kala-Kaua (1881)