Na Akua

by Clayton Smith

  Gray felt a chill of his own tingle down his spine. “What’s the plan, then?” he asked, throwing a few bills down on the table and heading toward the car. “You need a ride back to your van?”

  “You wanna crash in my van?” Polunu asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Ha!” Gray snorted. “No. I want you to crash in your van, and I want me to sleep in my hotel room, which was way too expensive to not be slept in.”

  “Hmm,” Polunu said, rubbing his chin. “You’re at the Hyatt, yeah? On Kā’anapali?”

  “Yeah.”

  Polunu nodded. “Then I’ll just go with you.”

  “Oooh, no,” Gray said, holding up his hands. “You can go back to your van, and I’ll pick you up in the morning.”

  “But that don’t make sense!” Polunu protested. “You’d have to come all the way to this side of the island just to go all the way back. Nah…it’s better if I stay with you.”

  “No way. Absolutely not.”

  “It’ll be fun!” the big Hawai’ian grinned. “Like a sleepover!”

  “Huh-uh. No, sir.” Gray shook his head. “There is only one bed, and I am sleeping in it. Alone.”

  “That’s okay,” Polunu shrugged. “I’ll take the floor.”

  “You’re gonna hate that,” Gray said, feeling himself giving in.

  “No way! I’m gonna love it,” Polunu beamed.

  Now, sitting on the bed and frowning down at his new roommate, Gray grimaced as he worked to pop his back. “Well? Did you love it?”

  “It was the best,” Polunu confirmed. And he sounded like he meant it.

  They grabbed oatmeal and coffee from the cafe in the lobby before heading out to the car. “You got a nice place here, cuz,” Polunu said, gazing up in wonder at the towering hotel.

  “Don’t get used to it,” Gray grumbled, fishing for his keys. “We’ll probably both be dead before we ever make it back.”

  With Polunu navigating, they sped toward the rising sun and the upcountry in the east. The landscape changed dramatically as they left Lahaina behind, fading from verdant hill slopes to a harsh, brutal land of red soil spotted with low brush that looked like giant mold spores against the mountainside. Then the world became lush again as they drove up Highway 380, and Gray shook his head as they approached the sprawling sugarcane fields of the expansive Maui flatland.

  “It’s like every single type of landscape in the world came to retire on Maui,” he said.

  “Every type of landscape in the world comes to live on Maui,” Polunu corrected him, giving the sugarcane a quiet salute. “The island provides all the things we need, and the things we don’t know we need, too.”

  “Which part of you needs a Big Mac?” Gray asked, nodding toward a McDonald’s off the highway.

  “Well,” Polunu said sadly, acknowledging the double arches, “the island can’t control everything.”

  Polunu directed them onto a new highway, and they doubled back south toward the lower part of the eastern half of the island. “So where exactly are we going?” Gray asked. “Where is this fabled ‘upcountry’?”

  “The upcountry is up,” Polunu replied, looking at Gray as if he’d just asked what color clouds were. “For an English teacher, you don’t know what words mean too much.”

  “And for an English-speaker, you don’t know how sentences work too much,” Gray shot back.

  They wound their way along the rising mountainside, with the Pacific Ocean glimmering in the morning sun to their right. The water was a startling blue and looked as smooth as a mirror from their altitude. Gray worked hard to forget the fact that there was about a 90% chance that this would be his last day on Earth, but he didn’t do a very good job of it. He just drank in the view as he drove, desperately willing himself to remember it. This is the beauty the world can have, he told himself. This is why it’s worth at least trying to survive.

  The Hook of Maui had been tossed unceremoniously into the back, where it had bounced off the seat and become wedged between the middle console and the floor. “How do you think we use that thing?” Gray asked, motioning toward the hook with a nod of his head. “Just, like, jam it in his chest?”

  Polunu shrugged. “We could always stab him through the neck,” he suggested.

  Gray drew back his head and made a disgusted face. “Geez, Polunu. That’s...intense.”

  “Just leaving all options open, cuz.” Gray could tell by his tone that he meant it, and intense or not, he was glad to have the Hawai’ian along for the adventure.

  “What’s the upcountry like? Aside from being ‘up’?”

  Polunu frowned. He shifted in his seat, his left arm crushing into Gray’s driving hand as the Corolla veered across the highway. “Hey!” Gray cried, jerking the car back onto the right side of the road.

  “Sorry,” Polunu said, casting his eyes down. “I’m just too big.”

  “Tell me about it,” Gray grumbled.

  “The upcountry, though...don’t really know what to expect, haole. They don’t really care for mainlanders up there. They got their own thing goin’ on, you know? Got sort of hard feelings against tourists and nā haole who come to Hawai’i and build ten-million dollar homes on the beach and complain about how many locals we got. In the upcountry, they sort of got their own rules. Their own gods, too.”

  “Their own gods?”

  “That’s right, braddah. The upcountry gods go way back, and they ain’t tied to the big gods. More angry, more primal, you know?” He shrugged. “That’s what the stories say, anyway.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Gray muttered dryly.

  “It ain’t fun at all,” Polunu replied seriously. “Sometimes even when locals go up to the country, then don’t come back at all.”

  Gray shook his head. “Thanks. I was joking, but...thanks.”

  “Just want you to know what you gettin’ into. The upcountry folk don’t come down to town much. Live in seclusion, you know? It does things to the brain, I think.” He held a finger up to his temple and swirled it around. “Scrambles you a little. Makes you weird sometimes. Maybe makes you dangerous, too.”

  “Great. So we’re headed up into the mountains to face a bunch of lunatics who hate mainlanders and worship angry gods. Anything else I should know?”

  Polunu thought a second. “They got lots of guns.”

  “Oh good. Just perfect. So glad I woke up for this.”

  “We should have brought lunch,” Polunu mused, staring out at the ocean.

  “We’re driving into a band of gun-toting hill people to find a wild, powerful pig-god who’s almost definitely going to rip us to pieces, and you’re thinking about lunch?”

  “Dinner, too. What if we’re still up there and we miss dinner?” he sighed.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, considering you’ll probably be dinner for a wild pig-god.”

  “Nah. Kamapua’a and his pigs, they eat you, maybe, but not me.” He patted his great belly. “Bacon and me, we got an understanding.”

  The hills were green and lush as they passed through the center of the island, but the landscape changed again as they wrapped around the southern coast of the harshly sloping mountains, and on the left, stretching toward the peaks, the earth became suddenly barren and rocky and bright, rusty red. The wind kicked up eddies of dirt, forming little red tornadoes that whipped across the mountain. It was quiet, and desolate, and distinctly Martian. Gray was amazed that the land could change so quickly, and so completely.

  But that was the left side of the road. The land on the right side was still green, covered with a thick layer of tall grass that swayed in the breeze, all the way down to the rough ocean cliffs.

  It was Mars on one side, the Great Plains on the other, with the paved highway bisecting the two halves perfectly.

/>   “It’s beautiful, no?” Polunu grinned, watching Gray’s face. “My Hawai’i is a special place. Nowhere like her on Earth.”

  Gray nodded as the landscape unfurled before them. Maui was nothing if not breathtaking in its beauty, and each new terrain was a blunt reminder that the island was in charge.

  “How will we know where to find this pig-god? And Hi’iaka?” Gray asked. His moonlit meeting with the gorgeous goddess seemed so long ago now, and he was startled when he realized only two nights had passed since. And if their meeting was ages ago, his own engagement and failed wedding was someone else’s lifetime. A different sort of tragedy that had happened to a different sort of person.

  The world had changed so much since then.

  “We gotta follow the pigs,” Polunu replied.

  “Okay. Sure. Follow the pigs. Makes sense. To find the pig-god, follow the pigs. I am actively deciding to buy into that idea,” he proclaimed aloud, just to prove to both Polunu and himself just how open-minded he was being about this brand-new world of gods and pigs. “And how exactly do we find them?”

  “We keep our eyes open. And we hope the gods are on our side.”

  Traffic was practically non-existent at this time of the morning, aside from the occasional pickup truck that blasted past them at 70 miles an hour. There were more goats on the road than cars, and more than once, Gray had to ease the Corolla to a stop while they waited for an errant herd to wander across the highway.

  “You see?” Polunu said. “I told you. Goats.”

  “You also said the road on the other side would be worse. But this is a smooth dream, my friend.”

  Polunu snorted. “You just wait, cuz. This road is much worse than the other one. You just wait.”

  As if on cue, trees reappeared on the mountain, and the dry desert faded into the rearview. The road ramped up to higher elevations and completely fell apart; the smooth, paved surface gave way to a deeply rutted, pocked disaster. The car bumped and bounced and rattled as they crept along, and the higher they got, the closer the road ran to the edge of the cliff. It was only wide enough for one car, with curves that wrapped around the mountain like ribbon. There had once been a guardrail, but it had long ago rusted away, and only the stark, naked metal posts jutted up through the rock. There was nothing to stop the car from pitching over the sheer edge of the mountain.

  “Who is in charge of your Department of Transportation?!” Gray cried, holding onto the wheel for dear life.

  “What, you think the mountain’s gonna lay down so you can put a nice, flat road on it?” Polunu asked with a laugh. He gave Gray a wink. “Try not to be such a haole, haole.”

  “I don’t wanna die in a rental car,” Gray whimpered.

  As they crawled up the mountain, the clouds knitted themselves together overhead, and rain began to spatter across the windshield. Gray gripped the wheel even tighter and slowed the car to a glacial pace. “See any pigs yet?” he asked, desperate to get off the road.

  “Not pigs,” Polunu said, pointing through the windshield. “But I do see breakfast.”

  “We already had breakfast.”

  “So what? You can’t ever have too many breakfasts.”

  A small gravel lot opened up on the left. Through the drizzling rain, Gray could just make out a faded, hand-painted sign that said Auntie Alina’s Country Provisions. Gray exhaled with relief as he pulled off the road and rolled to a stop in front of the little green shack. “Probably too much to hope for a breakfast burrito, huh?” he said, peering up at the rundown building.

  “It’s never wrong to hope,” Polunu said. He peeled himself out of the car and headed inside.

  “Right,” Gray sighed. “Hope is the best.” He tucked Maui’s hook out of sight. Then he ducked through the rain and followed Polunu into the roadside stand. There was no electricity in the shack; the only light came in through the open-air windows, but with the sky clouded over, not much sunlight filtered into the room. Rows of shelves had been inexpertly nailed into three of the walls, and a handmade, uneven counter was loosely fixed to the fourth. A slight, older woman stood behind the counter, her long, stringy hair hanging down in front of her thin face. She was almost impossible to distinguish from the shadows.

  “Aloha!” Polunu called, waving to the woman.

  “Aloha,” she replied.

  “Beautiful weather, yeah?” Polunu said, shaking the water from his big, sleeveless sail of a shirt.

  “Rain makes the taro grow,” she said curtly.

  Polunu nodded. “Yes it does,” he agreed.

  Gray stalked around the shelves, squinting at the produce through the gloom. The selection was sparse—a small basket of soft-skinned lilikoi, several browning bunches of the tiny bananas, a few plastic bags of homemade taro chips, three loaves of molding banana bread, three crates of wilting mangos, a sad stack of squishy avocados, and about half a dozen papayas. Gray grimaced as he inspected the mangos and was greeted by a swarm of fruit flies buzzing angrily around the crates. In the end, he settled for three of the bananas and a bag of the taro chips. Polunu grabbed up the three least-rotten mangos and a whole papaya.

  “How are you planning on eating that?” Gray asked, nodding at the papaya.

  Polunu tilted his head in confusion. “With my mouth,” he said. “You know?”

  Gray rolled his eyes. “Yes, I understand that, but how are you going to cut it open?”

  Polunu shrugged. “I’ll use a rock or something.” He grinned. “Don’t worry so much.”

  They hauled their breakfast over to the counter and spread it out before the woman. “I don’t suppose you take credit cards...?” Gray said.

  The woman grunted. “You from the mainland?” she asked. Her hair hung like rope, hiding her eyes.

  Polunu answered for him. “Yeah, but he ain’t so bad.”

  “Cash only,” the woman said.

  Gray reached for his wallet, but Polunu held out his hand. “I got this one. You drove.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Gray said, nodding. “I lost eight years of my life to the horror of driving up the world’s most terrifying cliffs, but the world’s lamest fruit salad is about to make it all worthwhile.”

  Polunu laughed as he fished a few dollars out of his pocket. He counted them out and made small talk with the owner. “You Auntie Alina?”

  The woman nodded once. “Mm.”

  “Thank you for the food, auntie.”

  “Thank you for your money, cousin,” she said, reaching for the bills.

  “He mea iki, auntie. Hey, listen, you see any wild pigs around here lately? Maybe the last day or so?”

  The woman paused. “Why do you ask me that?”

  “We are pig hunters!” Polunu gave her a broad smile, and he thumped Gray in the chest, sending him wheeling back a few steps. “Two strong men, out hunting wild pigs!”

  “You do not look like hunters to me.”

  “Today, we are,” Polunu said proudly. “We search for a big pua’a today, auntie. You seen any run this way?”

  The woman clapped her hand down over the dollar bills and slid them to her side of the counter. Her hair swung in front of her face, but she did not push it aside. When she spoke next, her voice took on a hard edge. “Do you seek Kamapua’a, children?”

  Gray started at the sound of the pig-god’s name. He leaned forward on the counter. “Is he near here? Do you know?”

  “I know, mainlander,” the woman breathed, her voice rattling. “I know.”

  Gray breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s great!” He turned to Polunu. “Can you believe that? Talk about luck! Ma’am, can you tell us where we can—”

  The woman raised her free hand, and even in the darkness, the shape of a knife blade was impossible to mistake. She stabbed the knife down at Gray’s hand, bu
t he yanked it back just as she drove the point down into the wood where his fingers had been a split second before. “What the hell!” he cried.

  The woman ripped the knife from the wood and climbed up onto the counter, snarling and spitting. She swung the blade at Polunu, and he tumbled backward, but not fast enough; the knife sliced through his shirt and drew a thin line of blood across his belly. He yelped as he fell into the shelves behind him, cracking them in half, sending splinters and slowly rotting fruit scattering across the floor.

  The woman scrambled off the counter, her long, tattered dress hanging limply from her skeletal frame. She swung her knife at Gray as he shrank back. Then she lunged, driving the knife at his chest. He picked up one of the mango crates and threw it up like a shield. The old woman’s fist tore through the flimsy wood, and her knife exploded into the mess of mangos, sending orange, pulpy juice spattering across Gray’s torso. Her wrist squirmed, the dripping point of the knife swiping in short, vicious circles. But the woman was up to her shoulder in the wooden bottom of the crate, and she could push her arm through no further. Gray’s heart was just out of reach.

  “This is not okay!” Gray cried. He shoved the crate hard, and the corner caught the woman in the jaw. She jerked backward, taking the wooden box with her. Gray ran to Polunu, who sat dazed against the wall, and tried to haul him to his feet. “Come on, come on, come on!” he yelled. But Polunu had slammed his head against one of the shelves in his fall, and a small trail of blood ran down his ear, pooling in the hollow of his collarbone and spreading like a blossom through the cotton of his shirt. His eyes rolled slowly up at his friend, clouded with confusion.

  “What—?” was all he managed to say before the woman ripped her arm from the mango crate and flung herself onto Polunu, stabbing down at his belly with the knife. Gray shot his hand out and grabbed her by the wrist. The woman was surprisingly strong, and he had to hold her back with both hands. Her hair swung angrily and brushed across the big Hawai’ian’s face as she struggled. Gray grunted with the strain of holding the old woman back, and he threw his shoulder into her arm. The force sent her flying off of Polunu and skidding across the floor, dragging Gray behind her. The knife went spinning across the shack and out the door into the muddy gravel. Gray scrambled to his feet, and the woman leapt up too. She spun around, her hair flying up to reveal her face.