Repo Shark

by Cody Goodfellow

  Donny Punani.

  It felt good to have an enemy.

  When you had an enemy, someone who hated you as much as you hated them, you knew they were thinking about you. So you lived your life as if you could almost see each other by some kind of telepathic hate rapport, as if some curtain would occasionally pull back in their mind’s eye and they’d see you when you were living extra large. It forced you to step up and take shots you never would, otherwise.

  To show them.

  It was what would make him get his shit together right there. He didn’t have enough to pay the bill. The manager was already on his ass. Whoever ate all this food already skipped. He doubted he had a car outside. He would just have to run for it. Head for the restroom, just past the cashier counter, and hit the doors and sprint for the far side of the parking lot.

  Easy. Simple. So get up and do it.

  Suddenly, he found himself sitting in a deep, dark shadow, and cold… He shivered and slid out of the booth with his eye on the front door. He ran right into Peapea’s belly.

  He fell back into the booth.

  Kewalo slid into the seat across from him.

  “One thing about Hawaiians, yeah? For real, we the only Polynesian people who gamble. Our aumakua, you know, our ancestors? They bet on everything, and they take it too serious. Like, Aztec serious, you know?” He drew his finger across his throat, pointing to Zef’s gold chain hanging around it, and grinned. Too many teeth for two mouths, stuffed into dead gray pincushion gums.

  The giant’s stomach made angry dog noises. Kewalo picked at the purple shit on the plate and passed Peapea a menu. “Bet their lives on surfing contests. Loser get cut up for sacrifice, maybe baked alive in an oven. Some say we pick it up from Japanese fishermen, but that a lot of shit. We learn it from our gods, I promise.”

  “Um, yeah,” Zef said, “listen…”

  “You owe Kewalo one hundred dollar,” said Peapea.

  “Bullshit… Look, that was just… yo, we were fokkin’ high as shit…” He pointed at the necklace and bling around Kewalo’s neck. “Anyway, we’re fokking even right there. Where’d you get my fokking chain?”

  Kewalo fondled his bling and grinned crooked teeth, all canines. Weren’t half of them gold before? “Ocean gave it to me. Now, for the last time, I promise—”

  The harried-looking waiter came back over. Peapea growled at him in Hawaiian and he wrote it down. Kewalo said, “And one country breakfast, yeah? Don’t burn my Spam, brah. Put it on his tab.” He slid Zef’s check across the table.

  “And more coffee,” Zef said, “fokking fresh and hot, this time, please.” When he was gone, Zef leaned in close and said, “Yo, I don’t have the cash on me right now. I was out late drinking and like, I hooked up with, like… this hot bitch… but I can—”

  “We can take you to your hotel,” Kewalo said. “Where you staying?”

  “I… Yo, look… I’m just a little prick with, like, a shitty job, like, on vacation… I was just fokking around on the beach… I’m not rich, I’m not looking to start trouble…”

  “Please,” Kewalo said, leaning forward to whisper, “start trouble. We love trouble.”

  Peapea added, “We eat trouble.”

  The waiter came back and reached around Peapea to fill Zef’s coffee cup. He was still foggy in the head, but the narrow window of opportunity was like sunlight in his eyes.

  Grabbing the waiter’s wrist and twisting it, Zef upended the coffee pot and dashed the piping hot coffee in Peapea’s face.

  Peapea rolled out of the booth squealing. Kewalo reached across the table, then jerked back when the hot coffee splashed him. Out the corner of his eye, Zef saw the cantaloupe orange laminate surface of the table shred and fly apart under Kewalo’s palm like a belt sander had gone over it. Kewalo jumped up and stabbed at him with his fork as Zef tried to get out of the booth. Zef smashed the coffee pot in his face. The tempered glass shattered on his chin. A backhanded swipe with the jagged edge gave his screaming face a harelip.

  Zef leapt out of the booth and threw his shoulder into the groin of the roaring, blinded giant. Peapea sat down hard on the next table and it collapsed onto the mailman’s lap. Zef threw the rest of his change and the pierced nipple on the table and bounded for the exit. His crazy legs were a blur. Linoleum tiles ripped off the floor and flipped away under his heels, but he went nowhere. A huge, brown horny hand was wrapped around his ankle.

  Still roaring, still apparently blind, Peapea jerked Zef off his feet and snapped him like a locker room towel in the greasy air, then smashed him to the floor and dragged him backwards.

  Zef mule-kicked Peapea in the face, grabbed a chair and smashed it over his head. The cheap aluminum chair bent and flew apart. Anything and everything he could grab, he threw—silverware, menus, plate shards, napkin holders. The Eureka moment came and went almost unnoticed. A syrup jug broke on Peapea’s forearm and cheap imitation maple syrup sloshed out, covering his skin. Suddenly, he simply let Zef go.

  Zef crabbed backwards away from the giant, almost paralyzed by what he was seeing.

  Peapea spastically bit into his own arm like he meant to eat it. His eyes rolled back in his head, the sugar somehow pushing out all awareness of the outside world and the fight he was in.

  Kewalo was under no such influence. The table parted like balsa wood and he came running. The mailman tried to grab him by the arm, screaming, “Hey, this ain’t right…” then he fell down holding a wet red mitten to his chest.

  The manager cowered behind the register, screaming into the phone. Zef hit the doors and ran for the parking lot.

  A couple classic Harleys were parked at the curb. Their steering locks weren’t on. He thought about jumping on one and riding off when an old mail delivery Jeep covered in bumper stickers swerved into the lot and crashed into both bikes.

  “God damn it, why didn’t you follow me, you stupid haole?” A husky Hawaiian grandmother leaned out of the wrong-side driver’s seat and pulled him into the Jeep. She wore burgundy lipstick.

  Kewalo came boiling out the door of the pancake house and sprinted across the lot after the Jeep. Zef tumbled into the back and rolled in a mound of rotten flowers. The overripe perfume outraged his nose like a long feather shoved down his ticklish throat, and something underneath it was so ripe he almost puked up his breakfast. A big canine travel carrier sat amidst the junk piled against the back doors, with a smaller one on top of it. Something inside the smaller one was clucking, while the bigger one was the source of the smell.

  “You one stupid fucking operator, you know,” said the local lady he apparently just had breakfast with.

  He was all set to rank her out, when he remembered seeing her before. She was the one who slapped Donny Punani at the karaoke bar. Holy shit, all he wanted was the fucking motorcycle and a satisfactory bowel movement…

  The Jeep swerved off the street and into the parking lot for a beach. Kewalo Waterfront Park, it said. No shit.

  “This is where they used to drown the kauwa…”

  He looked around, at an ocean liner and harbor cruise boats docked at a pier and a clipper ship that was a nautical museum. “The what, now?”

  “The outcasts.” She killed the engine and wrung her hands. She was short and he didn’t want to say fat, but her curves would have made a goddess of a taller woman. Zef knew he had a sickness for the thickness, but could he have gotten so out of his head…?

  “You think this a pretty place,” she said, “with pretty, simple people. Like the Indians back home, but dumber. You think this one big theme park. You come take what you want and leave a mess and we just sweep it into the sea, no problem, yeah?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, uh, ma’am… I’m just, uh, here on vacation, and… yo, seriously, thanks for picking me up back there, but… Like, don’t take this the wrong way, but… Do I know you? Like…”

  “It still hasn’t wore off, yeah? Cut the shit, I know why you’re here. You let s
ome shit slip when I picked you up.”

  He shook his head, punching his stupid brain. “Listen, I was fokking flying last night. Somebody…”

  “They do that to tourists, sometimes. But you walked right into his face. Either you one stupid motherfucker, or you the one who’s gonna do it.”

  He said, “Do what?” but she didn’t hear. She jumped out of the Jeep and opened the back. She dragged the carriers out and then pulled the tarp out onto the tarmac, and then she took out a big, cheap Styrofoam bodyboard. “You can help, you know…” When he reached for the carriers, she nudged him away and gave him a shovel.

  They dragged the pile to the edge of the lot and across the lumpy lawn to the rocks jumbled up at the edge of the water.

  The lady looked around, muttering under her breath so Zef thought shit, she’s a crazy bitch, but she was chanting something in Hawaiian. She opened the big carrier and a little black pot-bellied pig trotted out. She caught it by the collar before it could escape. She did something with her hands in front of its face, and it stood there like a windup toy.

  Zef was standing by, too, waiting for the right moment to beg off and walk away, wondering just what he must’ve told this lady. “So you know him pretty well…yeah?”

  She unrolled the tarp and threw an armload of flowers into the sea. “Get to work, already,” she said.

  “Doing what? I don’t—”

  “What you think the shovel is for? Start digging.” He started digging a hole where she pointed, looking around for cops. This was some sort of voodoo bullshit, but weren’t you supposed to do animal sacrifices in the dark?

  “Blood made nature tame in these islands, long before any white people came. Blood made the gods our slaves. Up on Punchbowl,” she pointed at a hill directly inland from where they stood, “there was a great heiau—a temple, you know—where people were sacrificed to keep the seasons turning.

  “Now shut up.” Kneeling on the rocks, she started chanting a little louder, but still way deep down in her throat. She set the bodyboard on the gently pulsing water and piled rotten flowers on it, making a bed. Then she put the pig on the bodyboard. They watched the tide pull the raft out over the aquamarine sea, and then a whirlpool sucked it out of sight, pig and all.

  “Hey, goddammit, what the fok—”

  She turned and her hand whipped out like she was going to slap him, but landed on his face like a hummingbird to cover his mouth. “You need to stop saying that.”

  Her hands smelled like flower perfume and pig shit. “What, goddammit—”

  “That. You go around calling it down like that.” She stopped, still staring into his eyes for a moment, and then her head cocked like she was looking down a hole. “You were all over it, like one hour ago. What happened?”

  He looked around like he had somewhere else to go. “Fok you, whatever…”

  “You better fix your attitude before it gets you killed. Gimme that shovel.” She jammed it into the turf and ripped it out. The earth underneath was redder than blood.

  “Anybody who don’t like my attitude can…”

  She finished digging the hole and opened the smaller container. She reached in and took out a red hen. “This part is for you, stupid. Hold out your hands.”

  He looked at her, thinking, Fok you, peace out, but when she locked eyes with him, he couldn’t walk away. He held out his hands and let her put the hen in them.

  He gritted his teeth, expecting her to take out a knife and cut its throat or something, but that was Santeria… Mexicans did that, but what did Hawaiians do? Everybody but honkies had black magic to protect them from honkies…

  Chanting, she did that thing with her hands that was over before he noticed it, and the chicken just sat still like his palms made a fine nest.

  “What the fok…?”

  “Put it in the hole.”

  He looked down. It was a chicken-sized hole, about two feet deep. “No way…”

  Do it, or you not getting Number One massage.”

  “So what? I didn’t want a…”

  “Or your drugs.”

  He grumbled, but he put the hen in the hole. It stood there stock-still, staring straight ahead while he shoveled dirt on it and tamped it down and covered it with the displaced chunks of turf.

  She chanted something else and bowed to the ocean, then picked up the animal carriers and scurried back to the Jeep.

  Zef followed, circling round and climbing in on the wrong side and the smell without the flowers was like a porta-shitter in summer. He would’ve walked, but where would he walk to? Catch a cab, but then he would never find out what was up with this witch—

  He leaned forward and rested his head on the dashboard. A bumper sticker on it commanded, COOK RICE, NOT ICE.

  “Everything out here is attitude, fool. That not a line to sell surfwear, I promise. And attitude isn’t about swinging your ule in the world’s face.” She slammed the Jeep into gear and gunned the engine to make it buck and leap the curb before she wrestled it into the street. “This new land, yeah? Bubbled up out of the ocean yesterday, in the big scheme. Islands got made one at a time. Oldest, Nihau, is seventy million years old, and already going back to the ocean. The big island still getting made. When a place is old, it’s marked by all what happened in it… but when a place is so new… no lie, there’s still magic here.

  “If you belong to it, then it’ll act like a live thing. It don’t like anger, and it hates fear. Islands love to punish fear. You think island people go around smiling all the time, happy and gay because we love you haole fuckers fucking up our home? It because you can’t be negative here, fool. Bad attitude like a lightning rod in a storm and it’s always raining somewhere.

  “The people here almost two thousand years ago, they didn’t wear no clothes, and they didn’t worry about who was making babies, but before long, they had kapu everywhere. Some fish kapu for women, some only the alii could eat. Places only the alii and the priests could go. The smoke from the temple pass over your shadow, you got to die. Every temple had a mu, who had to find the sacrifices. Any excuse, he trap a body for to cut up for the gods. We not stay cannibals, but our gods were hungry.”

  “Yo, this, all this… I don’t, uh, know…”

  “You don’t know history, do you? When they came out here, the missionaries, there were four hundred thousand of us, and just a couple hundred of you, but within forty years, there were only eighty thousand of us left, and the missionaries’ kids owned all the land. Wasn’t no war…just muumuus and smallpox, the white god and all his laws, and the white way of life. They came preaching sin and death and didn’t know their words out here were magic. Death magic worse than germs, worse than alcohol and Spam and Mickey D’s.

  “Lot of Hawaiians still believe in one god, but when they need something done on this side of the grave, they still leave treats for the menehune, they still make offerings to the gods.”

  “You keep telling me all this shit, but I don’t, uh... I don’t think I’m gonna need it, to…”

  “You don’t need to believe, but if you don’t respect it, if you don’t fear it a little in your head, then in your heart, when you see what you’re really into, you gonna remember what I said.”

  He squirmed in the seat, wondering if he shouldn’t jump out and run for it, when she turned and took his hand. “I trying to help you.”

  “Great, that’s great… Just… I never work with help… but I’m totally down to do this job…”

  “So, how you going to do it?”

  “Um, what?”

  “How you wen kill him?”

  He bit his lip and looked away. Shit, what did he tell her when he was blacked out? The idea that he’d been up and around and bullshitting fat old chicks and ripping off nipples for several hours with no memory of it made his asshole eat his jockeys.

  “I need to know more about him first,” Zef said, “like…is he into drugs? Does he like to party?”

  The sigh she let out went on
for a minute and left her an inch shorter. They stopped in the turnaround in front of the Illikoi.

  She said, “You don’t know what they were, back at the pancake house?”

  He got out of the Jeep and turned to walk away, but then leaned in the window. “They’re nobody.”

  She snapped her fingers in his face. “You don’t wise up, you just one sacrifice. Feed his fat belly, that don’t never get full.”

  He said, “Yo, listen…”

  “Shut up, or I knock you down, I promise.” She gunned the engine and lurched forward, but then stopped. “You should go home. Whatever you think you wen do… he going to eat you up.”

  “Alright, great, thanks! I like you, really, but like, I think we should see other people…”

  A valet came over and offered to take the Jeep. Zef feigned like he was going to punch him and the guy went away.

  “You got like a shadow or something riding you. It wasn’t there before.” She made gestures like a crazy person, or like somebody casting a hex. “You go catch bus and pack bag, but you not get your money back.”

  His hand went to his cash, which was still light a hundred dollars. “What’d I pay you for, yo? I get paid for what I do on ladies your age…”

  She spat out a bug. “Not! I not a whore, stupid haole. You paid for Number One lomi lomi, fix your problem.”

  “Well I don’t remember any of my problems getting fixed…” He stepped to her in a halfass boxer’s stance. “You owe me some fucking lomi, yo.”

  “You get yours so good you shit your pants, haole boy!” She caught his hand in an odd grip, like they were going to thumb-wrestle. She pressed her thumb into the back of his hand hard and hit some mysterious button that cut the bloodflow and nervous control to his legs like a karate chop to the kidneys. He swayed and almost sat down when she released him.

  As the Jeep peeled out of the turnaround, Zef was doubled over by a shooting pain in his gut.

  Legs wobbly, he ran for the elevator and jumped in with a Korean newlywed couple. Bent over in the corner with his back to them, he clenched his asscheeks together, but it was starting to come.