Na Akua

by Clayton Smith

  “I don’t like to drive,” Polunu said, shifting his bulk in the passenger seat. “You miss too much of the scenery that way.”

  Watching that mountain of a man squeeze into the little Corolla was like watching someone stuff a sausage into a Tic-Tac container. He filled the cabin like an over-inflated life raft, and his inadvertent crowding added claustrophobia to Gray’s current—and growing—list of fears. “I hope you enjoy the scenery when we’re dead!”

  Gray ground his teeth into powder as he piloted them slowly along the Road to Hana, an interminable snake of a two-lane road that wound like a coiled rope through the cliffs and forests of Maui’s northeastern coast. The road doubled back on itself every few hundred feet with a series of razor-sharp U-bends, and each one sent Gray’s stomach into spasms. The outside curves hovered the cars a thousand feet over the crashing ocean; the interior curves squeezed them along one-lane bridges with surging waterfalls on one side and bottomless gullies on the other. To top it all off, it was raining, and even with the windshield wipers scratching frantically against the onslaught, sheets of water still cascaded across the glass, and every single thing in Gray’s vision was blurred into shapeless doubles. “I can’t do it!” he screeched, jerking the wheel to the right as an oncoming Jeep whipped around the curve with its tires over the yellow line. “I can’t do it!”

  “Relax, brah; you doing good,” Polunu assured him, smiling out the passenger window and waving to a carful of trembling tourists who had pulled over to the side of the road to take a breath. “Besides, you think the Road to Hana is bad, you should see it when you get past Hana! Unpaved, washed out, just one lane of two-way traffic, no guardrails, heavy wind. And goats, too. Lots of goats.”

  “Goats?” Gray said, swallowing down the urge to puke as they snailed across a bridge that spanned a deep, open canyon.

  Polunu nodded. “Goats, braddah. They own that road. One wrong move on the other side—woooo! You slip out over 4,000 feet of ocean air. This road? Paved, guardrails...this road is nice. This is the tourist road.”

  “I’ll remember that when we’re upside-down in a ditch,” Gray mumbled. He glanced at the clock. The day had crossed into the early afternoon. “How much farther?” he asked.

  “Not too far,” Polunu assured him. “Maybe 20 more miles or something.”

  Gray gaped down at the speedometer. “I can’t do this road for another hour,” he whispered, his voice hoarse from the screaming.

  Polunu shrugged. “Just go faster then,” he smiled. “That makes it quicker.”

  “Shut up.”

  They drove on in silence, Gray’s knuckles glowing white from the strain of controlling the wheel. Every few minutes, another car would roar up onto his tail, and Gray would risk one hand off the wheel to throw it out the window and wave the person frantically around. He could get there fast, or he could get there alive, but he was pretty sure he couldn’t do both.

  He had never been so tense or uncomfortable in his life.

  Or so miserable.

  “Ooo, Coconut Glen’s!” Polunu cheered, stubbing his finger against the window and pointing to a little shack on the side of the road. “Pull over!”

  “I can’t pull over!” Gray screamed.

  “But coconut ice cream, cuz! Coconut ice cream!”

  Gray gritted his teeth. He checked his mirrors.

  Then he pulled over for coconut ice cream.

  •

  An hour later, they rolled into the lot that fronted the entrance to the cave. “We made it,” Polunu said with a grin. He gave Gray a nudge that sent the smaller man smashing against the driver-side door. “Safe and sound, yeah?” He popped open his door and heaved himself out of the car. The Corolla rocked like a ship in a wake.

  “Yeah,” Gray whispered to the empty cabin. “Safe. Safe and…and sound.”

  It took him a full thirty seconds to peel his fingers from the wheel.

  They stood together at the mouth of the cave. Gray frowned. “This is where Pele lives?” he asked. It was little more than a glorified hole in the ground. He was starting to suspect that Pele might be less of a goddess and more of a raving-mad homeless woman, squatting in a national park.

  “Not exactly. This is how we get to Pele’s home,” Polunu corrected him. “Maybe. If what my heart tells me is true.”

  Gray shook his head in disbelief. “It looks like a tourist trap. The kind where you get rolled for your Clif bars and left for dead,” he said. As if on cue, a pair of hikers climbed out of the cave, laughing and shaking the dirt from their hands.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s definitely that, too,” Polunu agreed. He raised his fist and stuck out his thumb and his pinky. He waved the shaka at the pair of hikers. “Aloha, cousins!” he cried.

  The hikers waved back. One of them tried to make a shaka with his own hand, but ended up throwing metal horns instead. He shrugged and went with it. “Aloha!” they cheered.

  Gray raised an eyebrow at his guide. “You’re a happy sort of person, aren’t you?”

  “What’s not to be happy about? The sky is blue, the grass is green, and the ocean is a gift that never ceases to give.”

  “Yeah, but it rains a lot, too,” Gray grumbled.

  “We have a saying in Hawai’i,” Polunu began.

  Gray shook his head. “Of course you do.”

  “We say, ‘Rain makes the taro grow.’”

  “In Missouri, we say, ‘Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day.’”

  “Oh, so it’s all Missourians who are grumpy,” Polunu said, giving Gray another nudge. He smiled broadly. “Come on, haole. Let’s go get a beat on your girl. Maybe she can lighten you up.”

  Gray couldn’t argue with that. So he shrugged and followed Polunu into the cave.

  “This is a lava tube,” the Hawai’ian explained as they climbed over the rough, knobby rock. “Long time ago, you take this walk, you get all red and melty. You ever time-travel a million years to the past, don’t you come back down here, cuz.”

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  They hobbled slowly along, guided by the dim light that filtered in through natural skylights in the ceiling of the cave. It wasn’t a deep tunnel, and after about five minutes of walking they reached the limit of the cave, a spot where the rock overhead opened up into a huge, broad circle. A shaft of sunlight thrust itself down to the cave floor, casting a surreal glow in the underground place. A handful of other visitors sat within the light, half a dozen teenagers sunbathing fifty feet below the surface of the Earth.

  “Aloha!” Polunu said.

  “Aloha!” they all replied.

  “Aloha,” Gray added, but it sounded way too forced, like when upper-middle class white people walk into a Mexican bakery and say, “Hola,” so he vowed to probably never say it again.

  “You guys having a good time? Enjoying the lava?”

  The kids murmured happily in response.

  “Good, good. You ever go back in time a million years, though, don’t come here!” They laughed.

  Gray gave Polunu a look.

  “What?” he asked, shrugging his big shoulders. “It’s new to them.”

  “Is one of them Pele?” Gray whispered, rolling his eyes. “That one looks like the stuff of gods.” He pointed to a girl who was attempting a handstand on the floor of the cave. She kicked her feet up into the air, then quickly lost balance. Her hands flew out from beneath her, and she crashed back down on her face. The other kids laughed.

  Polunu slapped Gray on the back. “You gotta have faith, braddah. Your whole attitude, you know? Trust me. It’s about to change.” He pulled Gray back down the cave a little ways toward the entrance, until he found a section where the floor was smooth. “Here. This looks like a good spot, yeah?”

  Gray groaned in frustration. “A
good spot for what?”

  “For giving you a whole new outlook.” Polunu grinned and knelt down on the floor and motioned for Gray to do the same. He did, reluctantly, balancing his knees on the hard, porous stone. “Pele is the goddess of fire and volcanoes. This lava tube, it falls under her domain, you know? This ground...” Polunu patted the ground beneath them. “This is Pele’s place. Put your hand here. Rest your palm there. Yeah, like that. You feel it? You feel the depth of this place?”

  Gray’s tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on his hand. “I feel...something,” he admitted, though the thing he felt most was a sharp, painful corner of stone.

  “That’s good,” Polunu nodded. “You touch this stone, you’re connected to Pele. To her history, and her power. That’s important.”

  “Okay,” Gray conceded. “I get it. Pele rules volcanoes; so get close to a volcano, and you get close to Pele. Great. Do we just...ask the rock?”

  Polunu screwed up his mouth in confusion. “Ask it what?”

  “You know. To go save Hi’iaka.”

  Polunu scratched the knot of hair on top of his head. “Why would we do that?”

  “Because it’s Pele!” Gray said. His voice echoed down to the sunbathing kids. They turned to stare. He gave them a dismissive wave. “Because it’s Pele,” he said again, more quietly. “You said—”

  “I said this is connected to Pele, not that it is Pele. Dang, haole, I don’t want to sign up for this trouble with someone who talks to rocks.”

  “All right, all right, shut up,” Gray grumbled. Polunu laughed. “Then...what do we do? How do we get to Pele?”

  “Ah! Now you’re asking the right question,” Polunu said, tapping his temple. “First, we need ho‘okupu.”

  “Ho‘okupu?”

  “It’s like a gift, you know? We present Pele with a gift, and see if she opens the door.”

  “Oh! Hey, I know this one!” Gray said, brightening a bit. “The concierge this morning, she told me if I was going to find Pele, I should bring her some gin.”

  “Puh!” Polunu said. He made an angry gesture with his fingers. “Gin. That concierge must have been a real haole.”

  “All right, you keep saying ‘haole.’ What does that mean?”

  “It means like a stupid white person from the mainland.”

  “What?!”

  Polunu shrugged. “You asked.”

  “You’ve called me that, like, a hundred times!”

  “Yeah, you’re haole, but you’re, like, a good haole. You know?”

  “No,” Gray said, narrowing his eyes and crossing his arms. “I don’t know.”

  Polunu grinned. “A nice haole is still haole. But you’re a good person, Grayson Park. You’re crabby today, but I see your soul.” He reached out and patted Gray’s heart. “You doing a big thing right now for the right reasons. You’re a good man. You’re a good haole. It’s like a compliment. But a bad haole...that’s someone who comes from the mainland and gets all white over the Hawai’ian culture. You know? Like people who come to the beach and steal sea glass. That’s our sea glass, cuz. You know? Don’t take that sea glass. That’s our sea glass.”

  “You’re a big fan of sea glass,” Gray observed.

  “It’s beautiful,” Polunu nodded. “Just an example, you know. But I do like it.”

  “So I’m a good haole and the concierge is a bad haole.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Because she likes gin.”

  “No, no, no. Because she thinks Pele likes gin. That’s a white people’s rumor. Why would Pele drink gin? If she’s gonna do shots, she’ll do, like, rum or something. With Hawai’ian sugarcane. Keep it local.”

  “Okay. So did you bring any rum?”

  Polunu burst out laughing. “Rum? Pele don’t drink rum! Damn, cuz, don’t be such a bad haole.”

  Gray rubbed his temples to show his deep and undying annoyance, but he couldn’t help but laugh. “I hate you,” he said. “Just so you know.”

  Polunu grinned. “I love you too, cuz. I love you too.”

  “All right. So if she doesn’t like gin and she doesn’t like rum, what does she like?”

  Polunu rubbed his hands together excitedly. “A good ho‘okupu is all about intention. You gotta give a ho‘okupu with something real behind it.”

  “I hope we can put something real behind a five-dollar bill,” Gray said, patting his pockets, “’cause that’s about all I got.”

  “Sometimes just the intention is enough,” Polunu said, closing his eyes. “You keep the money, but share your positive vibes.” He took deep breaths and placed his hands tenderly on the sloping wall before them. His lips moved imperceptibly with the words of his intention. Then he opened one eye and peered over at his companion. He cleared his throat. “Okay, mainlander. Anytime.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Gray mimicked his guide, closing his eyes and laying his hands against the stone. He thought about Hi’iaka, about the wind chimes in her laugh and her vanilla-salt scent. He remembered the quiet plea in her coffee-brown eyes when she spoke to him of her dreams, and he felt the warmth of her touch on his wrist, the heat that unrolled like a blanket across his arm.

  His own lips moved, and he whispered to the stone: “I’ll find Pele for you, Hi’iaka. I promise. She’ll find you, she’ll bring you back, and I will see you again.”

  The warmth on his arm became real, and now it spread down to his wrist, pooling across his palm, melting against the tips of his fingers. His hand pulsed with the heat...and then the sensation grew, warming his skin, tingling his flesh, until it was hot—burning hot, and suddenly, his palm was on fire. He yanked his hand back from the stone, crying out in pain. He opened his eyes, and his jaw dropped. The cave wall before him that was cold and black only seconds ago was now glowing red with heat.

  “You gotta let go when things turn to lava, cuz,” Polunu chided, clicking his tongue in disappointment. “Don’t you know nothing?”

  “What is—?” Gray began, but he couldn’t finish the thought. Before his eyes, the red glow of the wall spread wider and wider, creeping outward from the place where their hands had pressed against the stone. Then the center intensified to a brilliant orange-white, and the bright, hot stone began to drip down the wall, melting into trickles of lava that snaked lazily down the cave wall. Gray leapt to his feet and took a few steps back as the wall continued to dissolve into a pool that cooled down to a dark red-orange as it spread across the cave floor. Soon, the whole wide circle of stone had melted away, leaving a gaping hole in the wall.

  Gray gasped.

  Polunu nodded. “You got good intention, brah,” he said, giving Gray a bit of a sideways hug. “I knew it. You’re a good haole.”

  “That...is...impossible,” Gray said, digging for words like they were suspended in Jell-O. The puddle of lava at their feet had already cooled back down to a solid mass of rock, and Gray leaned closer, peering through the newly-formed hole in the wall. In the dim light, he could just barely make out a lava-rock staircase descending down, down, down into the darkness on the other side. “Are you seeing this?” he hissed, completely unable to take a full breath.

  “I see it,” Polunu nodded. “I guess Pele wants to talk to you, too.”

  Gray spun toward the group of teenagers for further confirmation, but they just sat in their sunbeam, blinking and chatting and completely nonplussed.

  “Do they not see this?” he demanded. “Is this not impressive enough? My God, what is wrong with Millennials?!”

  But Polunu shook his head. “They don’t see, brah. They don’t have the right intention.”

  “This is just...” Gray stopped, and he shrugged, shaking his head with his mouth agape. “I don’t know. There’s no word for what this is.”

  “Th
at’s the truth,” the Hawai’ian agreed. Then he gestured toward the hole in the wall. “After you.”

  Gray stepped nervously through the opening and tested the top step with the toe of his sandal. His skin didn’t melt off on contact, which he took as a pretty good sign. He put his whole weight on the stair, and it didn’t crumble away. “That’s encouraging.” He peered down the staircase and squinted into the darkness below. Then he cursed.

  “What?” Polunu asked excitedly. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing. That’s the problem. It’s dark as hell down—” But before he could finish, the edges of the steps began warming to a gentle glow, starting at the top where he stood and slowly working downward until the entire staircase was outlined in thin, orange ribbons of molten rock. “Ooookay,” Gray said, taking a deep breath. “Now that’s happening.”

  “I’m glad you’re going first,” Polunu confided.

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  Gray stepped down the staircase, careful to plant his feet gingerly in the center of each step, avoiding the cracks of lava that shone through along the edges. He stepped as lightly as he could, but every few steps he pressed too hard, and a stream of molten magma would squirt through the openings, splashing and hissing onto the stone stair and down into the abyss on either side.

  Polunu had a more difficult time. Each foot was the weight of a boulder, which made the lava beneath him stream up and spill around his sandals at every stair. “Next time, remind me to wear shoes,” he said miserably. He concentrated hard on bringing his foot down in the very center of each step, where the lava had a harder time reaching him.

  Down they crept, following the glowing orange lines as the steps curved to the right, then to the left, then back to the right, and back around to the left. The staircase spun and swirled, spiraling deeper and deeper into the earth. At one point, the grade broke into a flat walkway, and after a dozen yards, the steps reappeared, leading upward this time. They wound in every conceivable direction, and as the two men followed the path, time crawled, and slowed, and stretched, until Gray couldn’t tell what day it was, or what week, or what year. “How long have we been walking?” he whispered over his shoulder, because anything louder felt like it might bring the whole cave down on their heads.