Na Akua

by Clayton Smith

  Polunu nodded thoughtfully. “I got, like, ten cousins who work that job,” he said. “But it’s okay, they all good people. Whatchoo need?” He sat down on a blunt wooden bench behind the fruit table. It groaned and creaked under his weight, but miraculously, it did not collapse.

  Gray shifted nervously from one foot to the other, then back again. “Well...this is maybe pretty strange.” He took a deep breath. “But here’s the deal...”

  He proceeded to tell the Hawai’ian about the mysterious woman Hi’iaka, about her dream, and about the message in the sand. As he relayed the story, a huge rush of energy swelled inside of him, and he spoke faster and faster, going back for more details and peppering them into the story, spewing the words like a volcano. It was a relief to share the insanity of the last 36 hours with someone. It was too strange to keep it inside; it was spinning his brain, burning his neurons to a crisp, and once he opened the valve to release the pressure, it all broke loose—every bit. He talked about how Hi’iaka had smelled like coconut and vanilla, how the moon had shimmered down on the ocean like a painting, how the sand crabs had clicked their little claws and blinked their little eyes, how they’d had extraordinary penmanship for such unassuming crustaceans. He even told about how he’d vomited behind the towel bin, though it had absolutely nothing to do with the story, but it felt so good to be telling someone something that he told this person everything. And when he was done, he was sweating, and out of breath, and he felt wonderfully, immeasurably lighter.

  “So I’m here because I need your help,” he finished. “To find this Pele person.”

  Polunu stared quietly at Gray for several long seconds. The mirth had evaporated from his face, leaving behind an intensely placid mask that looked like it had been carved from wood. “So who are you?” he said at last, crossing his great arms in front of his powerful chest and raising an eyebrow. “Indiana Jones?”

  “Oh. Sorry...I’m Gray. Grayson. Grayson Park.”

  “Grayson Park?” Polunu snorted. “That sounds like a place.”

  Gray nodded and silently cursed his parents, not for the first time. “It does,” he agreed.

  “Listen, Grayson Park. You seem like good haole. The best thing for you? Go back to the Hyatt. Pack your bags. Take the next plane home.” He heaved himself up from the bench, and it sighed with relief. He stood up to his full height and placed one meaty paw on Gray’s shoulder. “Trust me,” he said, his eyes looking gravely down into Gray’s. “You don’t want no part of this thing you’re doing.”

  Gray returned the larger man’s stare. He saw a fierceness in Polunu’s eyes, but a kindness, too. And laid over it all, a sadness that felt intensely familiar.

  He sighed. “Is this about the pineapples? I’ll buy the eight pineapples, okay? If you help me.”

  “I am helping you,” Polunu said. “You got no idea what you stepping into.”

  “So I keep hearing,” Gray mumbled. He felt like a child being scolded for eavesdropping on an adult’s conversation. “You know, maybe if someone told me exactly what I was stepping into instead of just telling me to go away like some dumb tourist—”

  “You know who Pele is?” Polunu said, cutting him off, his brown eyes wide with curiosity. “She is akua, cuz. That’s what you’re stepping into. And you ain’t ready for nothing like it.”

  “Akua?” Gray asked, wrinkling his brow. “What’s that?”

  Polunu sighed. “It’s trouble,” he said. He picked up the machete and started digging around in the tabletop with its point, scratching haphazard lines into the wood. “You think you’re looking for a woman? Nah, braddah. Pele ain’t a woman.”

  Gray frowned. “What is she, then?”

  “Pele is powerful; Pele is strong. Pele is a whole other level, braddah.” Polunu leaned in close and whispered, “Because Pele is a god.”

  Chapter 6

  “So when you say ‘god,’ you mean...?”

  “I mean god, braddah.” Polunu popped a piece of pineapple into his mouth and swallowed it without chewing. Juice dribbled down his chin, and he wiped it on his shirt, exposing his great belly, round and tight as a drum. “Larger-than-life, stronger-than-strong, start-fights-that-cause-earthquakes-and-kill-mortals-and-leave-behind-canyons god.”

  Gray wrinkled his brow. “Like...a Zeus-Aphrodite-Olympus-style god?”

  Polunu considered this. “Yeah. Sort of like them. But with a better tan.”

  “That’s insane.” Gray passed a hand over his forehead and realized he was covered in a thick sheen of sweat, even though it wasn’t really all that hot out. Also, his heart was pounding, and he felt a little dizzy.

  “Insane, maybe, but that don’t make it wrong,” Polunu insisted.

  “Oh, come on,” Gray said, laughing harshly, a sound totally unrecognizable to his own ears. “Are you being serious right now?”

  “Serious as a daydream.”

  “You actually think that mythological Hawai’ian gods are real?” He spread his arms wide, gesturing toward the old wooden table and the broken-down Volkswagen. “And here?”

  “What, you think it’s normal that crabs go around writing secret messages in the sand all the time?” Polunu laughed. “In cursive? Who you think would even teach them cursive? That’s like a dead language.”

  “I don’t know how to explain the crabs,” Gray admitted, sitting down hard on the bench opposite the Hawai’ian. He put his forehead in his hands. “I’m trying not to think about it.”

  Polunu grunted happily and chomped down on another piece of pineapple. “You better start thinking about it,” he said with his mouth full. “It’s only gonna get weirder from here.”

  “Okay. Hold on.” Gray scrubbed his hands against his face, hard, hoping that when he opened his eyes again, he’d be back in the hotel, maybe on the beach, waking up from some weirdly realistic rum-dream. Or maybe he was still really in St. Louis, it was the night before his wedding, Lucy hadn’t left him, and none of this was real. He took a deep breath. He opened his eyes.

  The big Hawai’ian’s face grinned back.

  “Okay. This is dumb. But whatever. Let’s say gods do exist. Real, honest-to-goodness gods. Or goddesses—she’d be a goddess, right? Let’s just say they exist. Which, for the record, I do not believe, because that’s just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard…but let’s say they do.”

  “Okay,” Polunu agreed, crossing his arms. “Let’s say.”

  “Why would Hi’iaka ask me to find a mythological goddess instead of, I don’t know, say, the police?”

  “’Cause she’s her sister.”

  “Who is whose sister?”

  “Pele. Pele is her sister.”

  Gray frowned and shook his head. “Wait. Pele is Hi’iaka’s sister?”

  Polunu slapped the table. “That’s right! ’Cause guess what. Your mystery girl? She is also a Hawai’ian goddess.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Gray waved his hands through the air, desperately trying to clear away the insanity. “You think Hi’iaka is a goddess?”

  “Look, here’s what I know, Grayson Park from the Mainland: I know that there’s a Hi’iaka who is a goddess, and I know that that Hi’iaka is Pele’s sister, and it ain’t much work to figure if your Hi’iaka asked you to track down Pele, then it’s probably that Pele, and that Hi’iaka.”

  Gray sliced his hands through the air like knives, punctuating his words: “But the idea of there being ancient deities! Alive…and real! There’s no—it’s just not—I mean, how can you even…? Polunu! It’s insane!” He gasped. “Oh no. Polunu. You might be insane.”

  Polunu raised an eyebrow. “You don’t believe in gods?”

  “I don’t believe in a pantheon!”

  Polunu was silent as he thought about this. He offered the last piece of pineapple to Gray, who just shook
his head. So he shrugged and popped it in his mouth. “You know what I think?” he said finally.

  Gray sighed. “What?”

  “I think the gods are all around us, always, but you gotta know where to look.”

  “How wonderfully philosophic.” Gray shook his head. He stood up from the bench and began pacing on the far side of the table. “Look,” he said, his voice softer, “mythology is called mythology because the stories are myths—fictions that helped ancient people make sense of a world they didn’t fully understand. We don’t live in a world where a group of anthropomorphic super-creatures descended from their thrones on the mountaintops to create the earth so they could have a world-sized playground.”

  Polunu raised a finger the size of a billy club. “Our gods don’t come from mountains,” he said. “They come from Tahiti.”

  “Well, whatever.”

  “I’m just trying to help.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Sure it matters. Don’t you know anything about mythology, brah?”

  “Oh, it’s worse than that,” Gray said glumly. “I don’t just know about it; I teach it.”

  Polunu gasped. “You teach mythology, and you don’t know about the Polynesians?” he cried. His face fell, and he shook his head sadly. “Oh, Grayson Park…”

  “I only get one week to cover the whole unit!” he cried, coming admirably to his own defense.

  “That’s sad, cuz. That makes me so sad.”

  “Well, don’t cry, please. You’ll flood the whole jungle. I’m just saying that maybe there’s a God, or some higher-power something, but I don’t believe it’s Zeus and the Greeks, or Jupiter and the Romans, or Odin and the Norse, or Ra and the Egyptians, and I definitely don’t believe it’s Pele and the Polynesians.”

  Polunu let his chin droop to his chest, and for a second Gray thought the big man actually might cry. But after a few moments of silence, he lifted his head and smiled. “It’s like narwhals,” he said.

  Gray blinked. “Narwhals?”

  “Yeah. Narwhals. You know…like unicorn dolphins.”

  “Yeah. I know. What about them?”

  “Do you know they really exist?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah…I guess.” Gray suddenly felt annoyed, though he couldn’t quite pin down why. “I mean, I don’t sit around and contemplate the great and powerful narwhal, but I know they exist. So what?”

  “Lots of people think they don’t exist, ’cause they look so strange, you know? Little spiral horn and all.” He held his hand up to his forehead and thrust his finger up into the air. He even gave it a little swirl for effect. “Weird, right?”

  “Yeah. Pretty weird.”

  “It’s not pretty weird; it’s weird as hell, brah. People see that, and they think, ‘Whoa! That can’t possibly be real.’ They never seen anything like it before, so they can’t understand it. You know?”

  “Okay,” Gray said, planting his hands on his hips. “So what?”

  “So lots of people think the narwhal is just a myth. Like the gods. But just because you don’t understand something and ain’t never seen it yourself, that don’t mean it ain’t real.” He tapped the side of his head. “Sometimes, you only know the things you know.”

  Gray scratched his jaw. He slapped at a mosquito that buzzed up against his neck. What the hell was he doing out here, on the side of a road on the edge of a rainforest, talking about ancient gods with an 800-pound Hawai’ian selling fruit from a burned-out van? Whose life was he living right now? This is all Lucy’s fault, he thought, watching the cars roll past along the highway. She put me here, and I hope she dies alone.

  He wondered what it would feel like to mean it.

  He turned and looked back at Polunu. It was pretty clear the man was either on some pretty serious medication, or he needed to be. Prehistoric gods running around in the twenty-first century…it was so far beyond nonsense that it couldn’t even register. Still, Gray couldn’t explain the behavior of the sand crabs, or the message they’d left him on the beach. And there was something otherworldly about Hi’iaka, wasn’t there? Not just in her unearthly beauty, but in the way she seemed to glow, from the inside, from her spirit. It was as if she radiated divinity.

  And when she touched Gray, he felt that tingling warmth.

  Whatever she was, she wasn’t like any human Gray had ever met before. And he couldn’t explain that, either.

  But I guess sometimes you only know the things you know, he thought.

  He took a deep breath, then let it out. “All right. So you think a whole host of Hawai’ian gods really exist?”

  Polunu smiled and shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe not. Maybe you got it right. Maybe your girl ain’t no akua, and your hotel got some seriously messed up crab infestation on its hands. If that’s the case, you’re all good. You just go to the police, and they take it from here. But I tell you, if she is a goddess, and you go down the Pele path...braddah, you gotta be ready for what’s next.”

  All the moisture evaporated from Gray’s mouth. “What’s next?” he asked uneasily.

  Polunu snorted. “Pele will mean business, cuz. It ain’t no small thing to confront a goddess, but especially one like Pele. She got a fiery temper, you know? You want to deliver her the message, you better be sure you can handle the heat.”

  “I can deliver a message,” Gray said, feeling reasonably sure it was true. “It’s just words. I can say words.”

  “You ever try saying words to a raging fire?”

  Gray thought about that. “Well...no,” he said.

  “The fire don’t like to listen. The fire likes to burn. You keep it in mind.”

  “Got it,” Gray said miserably, feeling prickles against his skin. He shivered. “Thanks.”

  “No problem!” Polunu said, nodding happily. “And hey, if you do want to go down that road, you really came to the right place.”

  “Why’s that?” Gray said glumly.

  “’Cause I know all about the gods,” he said proudly, tapping his temple. “And I think I can help you find Pele.”

  Gray snorted. “Oh yeah? You guys hang out on your days off?”

  “Nah. But Hawai’ian legend is strong in my family. It’s strong in here,” he said, fluttering his hand against his chest. “I feel nā akua in my heart. I think I know where you should look. If you wanna cross that line.”

  Gray shook his head again and pressed the heels of his hands to his cheeks. “This is so stupid,” he muttered to himself.

  “So what you think, haole? What you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know,” Gray admitted. “What do you think I should do?”

  “Oh no, brah. This is your decision. I’m just a guide along for the ride.”

  “Well, do you think it’s a good idea? Or a bad idea?”

  “Oh, I think it’s a terrible idea. Why you wanna mess with the gods? They don’t play by our rules, cuz. They play hard, and they play mean, and their games don’t have rules.”

  “So you wouldn’t do it.”

  Polunu thought about that. “Hmm…” he said as he rubbed his chins. “Well…if a pretty girl tells me some masked man is hunting her down in her dreams, then she disappears, sends me a message with crabs in cursive, asking me for help? Yeah, cuz…I guess I’d do what I can to help that pretty girl out. Akua or no, I think I ain’t much good if I can’t help other people on this earth, you know? Even if the problem is impossible.”

  Gray exhaled slowly, his breath rattling through his teeth. “Yeah,” he said. “Even if the problem is impossible. That’s pretty much what I think, too.”

  “Plus, what you got to lose? You don’t even believe in the gods. You can’t be scared of something you think don’t exist.”

  “I guess that’s true, too.”

 
Polunu grinned. “So we going on an adventure?” he asked.

  “Sure. Why not? Might as well see how far this train can go, right?” Gray extended his hand toward the Hawai’ian.

  Polunu frowned down at it. “What’s that?”

  Gray tilted his head. “It’s a hand.”

  “I know it’s a hand,” Polunu said suspiciously. “What’s it doing?”

  “What do you mean, what’s it doing? It’s waiting for you to shake it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It just seemed like…we’re starting something big together, we should shake hands.”

  “Nah.” Polunu grinned his huge grin and lumbered around the table. “We’re into the stuff of legends, brah—you’re my cousin now! Cousins don’t shake hands; cousins hug!” He threw his arms around Gray and squeezed. Gray tried to scream out in pain, but his lungs were crushed beneath Polunu’s flabby, powerful arms, and his mouth was buried in the big man’s belly. Polunu swatted him on the back, and Gray’s teeth clacked together. He tried to pat his new friend in return, but his arms were pinned, so he just flailed his hands like dying fish until Polunu was satisfied.

  When the big man pulled away, there were tears glistening in his eyes. “This is a beautiful thing,” he said. “But, you know, before we get started, I gotta tell you something,” he said, boxing up the fruit and tossing it into the van.

  “What’s that?” Gray asked, pulling new air into his re-inflating lungs.

  Polunu closed the door and clapped the dirt from his hands. “Pele doesn’t mess around for real, cuz. And if we do find her, there’s a pretty good chance that she’ll just kill you for fun.”

  Chapter 7

  “Why didn’t you drive?!” Gray screamed.

  He hadn’t meant to scream. But his hands were cemented to the wheel; his spine burned from sitting so erect, his eyes blurred from focusing so hard on the road, and he had never been so terrified while moving so slowly in his entire life. He screamed because his biology gave him no other choice.