by Don Winslow
It all makes sense.
Chon remembers something else about Bobby Z.
He was an asshole.
“People change,” Ben says when Chon fills him in.
“No they don’t,” says Chon.
* * *
O rejects the idea (the observation, the imputation, the accusation) that she’s a hedonist.
“I’m not a hedonist,” she told Ben and Chon one day. “I’m a shedonist.”
There’s a difference.
* * *
O loves it here.
Hanalei Bay is the prettiest place she’s ever seen. To her left rise emerald-green mountains, to her right the golden beach stretches to an old pier by a river that runs down from the hills. The ocean (the Pacific, for the geographically challenged) in front of her is a cerulean (O likes that word, “cerooolian”) blue, and the whole scene is fringed with palm trees and populated with beautiful men and women.
Hawaiian men are impossibly gorgeous, and so are the women, thinks O, who is bi nature and inclination bi.
No stranger to beauty, she grew up (or failed to) in Laguna Beach, the prettiest town in California (no small claim) among the beautiful people, but Hanalei is on a different order of things altogether.
The scenery, the people, the food . . .
Add to those the happy fact that Paqu is several thousand miles and an ocean away back in Laguna, and this could be paradise.
It rains here at some point almost every day. O doesn’t mind—in fact, she likes to walk in the ephemeral showers and then enjoys the warmth of the subsequent sunshine.
She loves the house they’ve rented, just across a small park from the beach, a beautiful two-bedroom bungalow that has a large living room with ceiling fans and a wraparound porch she’s learned to call a “lanai.”
O loves that she can have fresh fruit—papaya, guava, mango—for breakfast with strong Kona coffee, and she likes to walk the few blocks into town to have a plate lunch of white rice and macaroni salad with pulled chicken or Spam (more about which below).
They usually go out for dinner to one of the great local restaurants for some kind of fish, although for the last couple of nights Ben and Chon have cooked at home.
Both men are good in the kitchen.
O is not.
O can make:
A bowl of Cheerios
A bowl of Froot Loops
A cheese sandwich
Lasagna (Stouffer’s, microwave)
A Hungry Man Fried Chicken Dinner (Swanson’s, ditto)
But she does like to eat. When Paqu once observed that “Ophelia eats like a bird,” Chon countered that the bird was a turkey vulture. The girl can pack it away like a pregnant horse but no one knows where it goes. The calories just seem to disappear like money in a Hollywood film budget. Nevertheless, her mother often complains that O is carrying somewhere between five to ten pounds of excess baggage on her hips or her thighs, imaginary fat that Paqu has had frozen off her own body.
“Giving yet more credence to the Ice Maiden image,” O observed.
Paqu has a Goldilocks attitude toward O’s dietary habits—her daughter eats either too little or too much, she’s either too skinny or too fat, but never “just right,” another reason O is happy she’s put half the Pacific Ocean between them.
Because of the plate lunches, O has developed a taste for Spam.
“What is Spam?” she asked Ben one day.
“No one knows,” Ben said.
“Even the people who make it?” O asked.
“Especially the people who make it.”
O doesn’t really care what gets into Spam, as long as Spam gets into her. She just loves the stuff. And poke—chopped-up little bits of raw fish in soy sauce, sesame oil and chili peppers.
Anyway, O loves Kauai.
She loves the culture created by a mélange of Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and Anglo traditions.
She finds the food, the weather, the people . . .
Warm and soft.
Something she’s been looking for her whole life.
* * *
Once wooden, the pier is now made of concrete and stretches 340 feet out to a canopy at the end.
An old man stands there fishing.
He’s handsome, O thinks. White hair and beard, a deep tan, an old ball cap pulled down above the kindest, gentlest eyes she’s ever seen. She’s too shy to approach him, but the man spots her and says, “Beautiful here, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“They call me Pete,” he says, extending his hand.
“I’m O.”
“Short for . . . ?”
“Ophelia.”
Pete smiles. “O is better.”
“Yes, it is,” O says. “Do you fish here every day?”
“No,” Pete says. “Sometimes I fish at night. Depends on when they’re running. Would you like to try?”
“I don’t know how.”
“I can teach you,” Pete says.
She’s used to a lot of old guys—some of them stepfathers—wanting to teach her something, except it wasn’t fishing.
But this feels different, and she nods.
He hands her the rod and reel and stands behind her, showing her how to cast. And it isn’t creepy, O thinks, not at all dirty-old-man sketchy, just a nice guy really teaching her something.
It’s nice.
* * *
O tells Pete about her childhood.
The mother who was either absent or obsessively, suffocatingly present, the multiple stepfathers, growing up thinking that her father was someone else. . . .
“Sounds rough,” Pete says, rebaiting his hook.
“It was.”
“On the other hand,” Pete says, straightening up and looking at her, “you weren’t poor, were you? You had a roof over your head and food on the table. You had a lot of advantages. What did you do with them?”
Good question, O thinks.
Good fucking annoying question.
Nothing, she thinks as she walks back to the house. I’ve done absolutely nothing with my advantages.
But O rejects the idea that she’s a nihilist.
“Actually,” she said when Chon first brought up this notion, “I’m Cleopatra.”
“That’s a non sequitur,” Chon said.
“Not at all,” O said. “I’m the Queen of the Nihilists.”
* * *
When Ben and Chon get back to the house, O’s waiting with an announcement. “I’m joining Mother Teresa.”
“Mother Teresa is dead,” Chon says.
“Oh.” She thinks about this for a second. “Okay, who isn’t dead?”
“The people we’re having dinner with tonight,” Ben says. “We want your take on them.”
“You want my take?” O asks.
“You’re a good judge of people,” Chon says.
Which would make me, she thinks, like, useful.
* * *
They meet at a restaurant called Postcards.
Tim Karsen or Bobby Zacharias or whoever the hell he is cleans up well in a white Henley shirt untucked over a clean pair of jeans.
Elizabeth, O decides, is simply stunning. A simple black blouse over (tight) black jeans.
And Malia . . .
Malia is Hawaii, O decides.
Tall and lithe, long black hair, shiny like a starlit night, caramel skin, large almond-shaped brown eyes, a voice as soft and low as a sunset.
Smart, funny.
And she stands up to Kit as if he isn’t the most beautiful male specimen that O has ever seen.
I’m never leaving, O thinks.
Ever.
* * *
They came to Hanalei when he was about six years old, Kit tells them over dinner.
At first it was hard and he hated it, being the only haole kid in his school. The native boys beat him up practically every day, wouldn’t play with him, made fun of him.
“What changed?” O asks, leaning over the table, drinking
him in.
“Surfing,” Kit says.
He went down to the beach one day, and the kids from his school were out surfing. Some had their own boards, most were sharing, taking turns. At first they ignored him, then told him to go away, but he stayed and stood on the beach until finally . . .
An older kid named Gabe walked over with his board and asked Kit if he’d like to try. He showed Kit how to lie down on the board, how to paddle, how to stand up. Then he walked him out into the water and helped him catch the small waves that were coming in.
On his third try, Kit stood up.
He was hooked.
He went down to the beach every day.
He got good.
The Hawaiian kids saw it, started to leave him alone, stopped teasing him, partly because they saw he could surf but also because Gabe threatened to beat the shit out of them.
Gabe started to come to the house. Sometimes he’d bring the other kids, mostly he’d come by himself.
Kit bugged his parents for a board.
He worked for his dad—Tim was cobbling together a living doing handyman and light construction work—doing odd jobs, cleaning up, anything to earn money for that board. It took a year, but one Christmas morning he got up and there it was, used but beautiful, a seven-foot-six-inch Hobie single-fin.
“I still have it,” Kit says, smiling over at Tim and Elizabeth.
He became a sensation, one of those wunderkinds who got written up in Surfer, got sponsorships from Billabong, appeared in videos. But he never entered any of the competitions or tournaments.
“Surfing’s never been about that for me,” Kit says. “I’ve never seen it as a competition or a business. It’s just something I love doing, and I never wanted to ruin it.”
He got a reputation anyway.
Magazine editors, photographers and just plain surf fans would come from all over the world to watch Kit surf. But Kit wouldn’t go to them. He went to Maui to ride the big waves at Jaws and to Tahiti to do the same, but he came right back to Kauai and stayed.
“It’s my home,” Kit says. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I’m happy here.”
He loved the island, and it loved him back.
Kit was no longer a mainlander, a haole, but a local, part of the ohana, a brother.
He’s dating a Hawaiian girl, in fact, Malia is the only girl he’s ever dated.
So he stays in Hanalei, doing carpentry or working with his dad, occasionally doing a surf video, getting honorariums from the surf companies for wearing their clothes or riding their boards, or posing for an ad, endorsing a wet suit, a board, a pair of shades.
He was fifteen when he made the cover of Surfer.
But he isn’t just a surfer—he’s a waterman—a swimmer, a diver, a lifeguard, as skilled on a Jet Ski, a canoe, a boat as he is on a board.
Kit Karsen is about as happy as a person can be.
“You came here when you were six,” Chon says. “Where were you before that?”
California, Elizabeth answers.
We came here from California.
* * *
Ben and Tim walk outside the restaurant.
“So are we going to do this?” Tim asks.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your hesitation?”
“I can’t do business with someone who isn’t honest with me,” Ben says.
“What am I being dishonest about?”
“Well,” Ben says, “let’s start with who you are, Bobby.”
“You think I’m Bobby Z,” Tim says.
“Aren’t you?” Ben asks.
“No,” Tim says. “I mean, I was for a while.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ben asks. “Can we stop playing games here?”
“My real name is Tim Kearney,” Tim says.
He tells Ben a story.
* * *
O has always lived by the saying that “ignorance is bliss.”
This makes her, in her own judgment, one of the most willfully blissful people on the planet.
Of course, she doesn’t know the origin of the quote.
That would be counterproductive.
(Thomas Gray, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” if you must know.)
“Do you know my friend Pete?” O asks, sitting at the table savoring a dessert of mango sorbet.
“Pete the Bait Guy?” Kit asks. “Sure.”
“Everyone knows Pete,” Malia says.
“What’s his story?” O asks.
Elizabeth shrugs. “He came here about a year ago. Then stayed. Mostly fishes, sells bait to tourists. It happens a lot. People come to visit, fall in love with it, and never leave.”
I get it, O thinks.
* * *
Tim Kearney (Tim uses the third person, like he’s talking about someone else) was a three-time loser, a B&E artist whose greatest skill was getting caught. Even a stint in the marines didn’t change his ways, and he went from Kuwait into the joint.
His only salvation was that he bore a remarkable physical resemblance to a major marijuana trafficker named Bobby Zacharias.
A Mexican cartel was holding a DEA agent hostage and was willing to swap him for Bobby Z. Problem was that Z had died of a heart attack in the shower—at least that’s what the DEA told Tim.
They gave him Z’s trademark scar and took him to the border to make the switch.
Which is where things went sick and wrong.
Seemed that the cartel didn’t want to rescue Bobby Z, they wanted to kill him. So the hostage transfer was actually an ambush. But Tim got out and ended up in a desert hideout, where he met Elizabeth, who was looking after Z’s little boy.
“Kit,” Ben says.
Tim nods and smiles. “Best thing that ever happened to me. Turns out that the Mexicans wanted to kill Z for knocking up Kit’s mom. I went on the run, took Kit and Elizabeth with me and ended up here. Been happy for twelve years.”
“And the Mexicans gave up looking for Bobby?”
“All the players are dead now.”
“Does Kit know you’re not his real father?”
“Kit knows that I am his real father,” Tim says. “He knows Bobby Z was the sperm donor.”
“He really loves you,” Ben says.
“I really love him,” says Tim. “So now what?”
“I need to talk it over with Chon and O.”
* * *
Which he does, on the way back to the house.
“What do you think of them?” Ben asks.
“I can’t decide,” O says, “which one I want to sleep with more. Tim is like a handsome teddy bear, Elizabeth is the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen, Malia is exquisite, and Kit . . . Kit is a young Greek god.”
Ben tells them Tim’s story.
“Do you believe him?” Chon asks.
“Who could make up something like that?” Ben asks.
“So the real Bobby Z is dead,” Chon says.
Ben shrugs. “Legends die. So what do you think?”
“I think we should do business with them,” O says. “I think we should do business with them and live here forever.”
“You can’t fuck any of them,” Ben says.
“And Mother Teresa is dead.” O sighs.
“So are we going to do this thing?” Ben asks.
“We’re going to do this thing,” Chon says.
It’s all good.
* * *
Chon stands at the edge of the cliff—
(No, it’s not symbolism. He’s standing at the edge of the goddamn cliff, all right? How else is he going to jump in? Jesus Christ.)
—and tosses his board in.
Then he jumps in after it.
Look, Chon isn’t the world’s best surfer, he’s not Kit Karsen Zacharias Kearney, but he’s a former Navy SEAL (I’m aware that this has become a hoary cliché, and also aware that “hoary cliché” is an example of itself, but that’s what he is), so he knows his way around cliffs and water.
He got out there early, just at dawn, so as not to interfere with the locals, and now he’s out there alone as he sinks into a swirling current, fights his way up through it, grabs the board and attaches the leash to his ankle. Then he paddles out into the break. It’s not as big as it was yesterday, but it’s still big, Hawaii big, and he has to work hard to catch a wave.
But when he does, it’s
Awesome
An overused word, Chon knows, worn to the point of meaninglessness, but if anything can inspire genuine awe, it’s a big wave on the North Shore of Kauai. If you can’t be awed by that, you have no heart and no soul.
He doesn’t try any tricks—no top turns, tail-slides or Supermans, just tries to stay on his board on the ride in, which is fast and bumpy, and then he bails out before the wave takes him into the rocks.
He gets four good rides, about all he can take, and then paddles over to the beach on the other side of the rocky point, and that’s where the trouble starts.
Actually, the trouble is waiting for him.
* * *
Pete bends down, reaches into his tackle box and comes out with something wrapped in tinfoil.
“You ever had one of these?” he asks O, opening the tinfoil.
“What is it?” O asks.
“A fried egg in an onion bagel,” Pete says. “Have a taste. If you haven’t had one of these, you haven’t lived.”
O has a taste.
Decides that she hasn’t lived.
* * *
There are six of them, and they’re waiting for him to wade in.
It’s Saving Private Ryan on a beach in Kauai.
The leader, the one who walks up to Chon as he comes out of the water, is the Hawaiian who talked to him the other day. He wears black board trunks, a white T-shirt with the legend DEFEND HAWAII in black, and a black ball cap with the numbers 808—Hawaii’s area code—reversed in white.
The other five, all big mokes, come up behind him.
“Hello,” Chon says.
“You live here?” the leader asks. “If you don’t live here, don’t surf here. You haoles come over from the mainland, think you own everything. This is our break.”
“Got it,” Chon says. “I’m leaving.”
He goes to step around the leader, but the guy moves into his way. “You know who we are?”
“No.”
“We’re the Palala,” the leader says. “You know what that means?”
“No.”
“The Brotherhood,” he says. “We’re brothers. I’m Gabe Akuna.”