The gun in his mouth nodded his head for him.
“Means ‘Fuckup Boy.’”
Auntie Kalei said she never stayed in hotels, but she couldn’t go near most houses, either. “Ghosts don’t just come from people dying,” she told him as she cooked some purple sludge that stank like manure on the stove. “They come from people living in a place. When you stay in one place it rubs off on you, but you rub off on it too, leave some of you behind.”
She didn’t like old houses where people had lived their whole lives, because ghosts soaked into the walls, a stink deeper than cigarettes and cooking and piss on the floor around the toilet. “That’s how Marilyn Monroe can haunt like twelve different houses…”
Timeshares like this one were better. Only tiny but intense slices of people soaked into the walls, a hundred, a thousand of them in bite-sized pieces, all similar, shallow vacation ghosts. When she lay still on the couch, she could feel them, all the pent-up lust and hopes and expectations for the vacation, and all the frustration and rage when they didn’t get what they wanted, all the guilt and denial when they did.
Zef sat on a barstool and listened attentively, or at least pretended to, as he had while she bandaged and stitched his impressive catalogue of wounds, because she jerked the thread in the wound or splashed alcohol into an open cut when he tuned her out. His eyes never left the gun on the counter, between her stirring spoon and the ashtray. She smoked a fat, swaybacked joint. She didn’t offer him any.
He was looking at the gun so he didn’t see the big wooden spoon until he felt it slap his face. “Hey, haole boy! You listen!”
She had a weird way of moving around the kitchen that made all the sounds around her into a constant, lilting rhythm. In the shower earlier, the water hit the floor in a slippery, musical cadence like she was doing the hula, or like she wasn’t alone in there.
He’d tried more than once to tell the crazy old witch that his job was the motorcycle, and it was over, but she wasn’t listening.
“Your motorcycle still here. Nothing ever leaves these islands. You don’t know what you came for, what brought you, but it not done with you.”
He watched her stir the purple shit. Big, lazy bubbles flopped and popped, exuding toxic gases. “Just like people leave mark on a place, places and their ghosts leave mark on the people, if they open or empty enough. Like when one lady on her period, or when man get one head full of bad drink and black out…” She smiled at him.
“None of this shit got nothing to do with me.”
“You don’t want to believe, you go ahead. But Donny… you don’t need to believe in him. He’s kupua. Ghost-god. Shapeshifter. Only a true kanaka ma’oli can take him down.”
“Whatever, shit…”
“He eat you like spam, can and all. You need faith to beat him.”
“I don’t need faith to do nothing, baby. I’m a motherfokking ninja, an’ shit. But anyway…”
“You stupid haole boy. You think you know everything but I bet you never read one book.”
“Fok books. Books are stupid. Most of them come right out and tell you they’re madeup bullshit. The rest, you can’t even tell, but they always make shit up. They just push it at you, and you have to believe, because it’s in a book. I’m a lie detector, baby. I can fokking smell bullshit.”
She shook her head sadly. “You think what happening to you just happen, you got one more think coming.”
“I don’t believe in supernatural shit. Sonofabitch ain’t no ghost. He’s solid, he’s alive and he’s gonna die someday. But not from me…”
“He’s not one ghost, I promise, he’s ghost-god. You don’t even know what one god is.” She pointed at the row of plastic tikis arrayed behind the stove—squat dwarf bodies holding up huge totem pole heads that were not animal or mineral or vegetable, but somehow an abstract attempt to represent volcanoes and tidal waves and lightning bolts.
“The great gods—Ku and Lono, Kane and Kanaloa—came from Kahiki over the sea. Some say they were just men when they made the trip, but now they’re worshipped all over, from the Marquesas to the Carolines.”
Returning to stir the purple shit, she carefully spilled some into the fire, nodded at the hissing and redoubled stench.
“Anywhere nature still alive, some men can make her one slave, but nature, she make men to do her work.” She reached out and pinned his hand to the counter. “You were good to her, right? She take a lot out of a man.”
For just a moment, Zef felt a blasting heat rise up inside him and bloom out of his face. “Who the fuck…?”
She touched a blister on his neck that wasn’t there when he wrecked the bike. She whispered, “Pele.”
“Don’t touch my fokking body.” Zef backed up, trying not to feel like a little boy with his first stiffie. She suddenly didn’t seem so old, the missing teeth didn’t seem like such a liability. “I don’t know nothing about no black soccer player.”
“Don’t matter if they real or not, or ever were. When they were our gods, they walked among us, and that power don’t just go away. It finds its way into the people who need it, and it uses the people when it needs something done. And right now, it needs an end to Donny Nanaue.”
She struck a thinking pose, hand on chin, eyes screwed up into a thousand yard stare, tongue slightly protruding from her wide mouth like she was posing for a portrait. It looked ridiculous, but it worked.
At least, for Zef, it did.
“What you need…” Auntie Kalei started to say, but then she saw the cheap Chinese automatic in his hand.
“Like I said, I’m not here to kill your ghost-god motherfokker. I got hired to take his bike. Mission accomplished. I’m going home to count my cash.”
Tossing her head back, she cackled. “You one broke-ass lie detector, I promise.” Snapping her towel at him, she snapped, “Go on! Go!”
He pointed the gun, then at the last minute dipped his hand and fired three rounds into the stewpot on the stove. The double-hulled pot slammed into the wall and danced on the burners. Scalding water splashed on Auntie Kalei’s wrist and arm, making her yowl like a cat. Simmering poi mudslide gushed out and doused the blue gas flames in starchy swamp stench.
He backed up and ran for the door. She didn’t chase him. Out in the yard, he dropped the gun in a birdbath and ran into the parking lot and saw her postal surplus Jeep with the door open and the keys in the ignition.
He was only a few miles from his motel room in Waianae, but he left nothing there he wanted to risk his life for. He stopped at a Purple Heart thrift store and walked out two minutes later in a red Marine Corps hoodie and Tapout sweatpants. He hit a McDonalds, where the McRib was apparently mandatory.
His return ticket was some kind of friends and family standby thing, so he only had to call the airline and check the flight load for the three evening flights to LAX and the one direct flight to Vegas. His chances of going straight home at eight o’clock looked excellent.
He ditched the Jeep at a Tesoro station across the street from the rental car return and ran through the long-term lots all the way to the American terminal.
He had only met Kjirste, Harv’s stewardess niece, once, when they flew to Atlantic City for vacation once. She flicked his ear when he tried to touch her ass, which was ridiculously huge and perfectly heart-shaped, like the fucking Hottentot Venus. His earlobe bled so fucking much they almost detoured the flight. That was when Zef was fourteen.
He had no idea what she looked like now, but he talked her up to the ticket counter staff. The lady was really nice. Tipping a glance at his hoodie, she thanked him for his service, jumped Zef to top of the wait list and chatted him up while she made a copy of his driver’s license and went back behind the wall where the luggage went on the conveyor belts.
With no bags, he should get to skip most of the security line, too. They had customs here, but they were looking for people smuggling plants and animals and shit. An Asian woman with two pairs of thick glasses lined up on
her nose collected forms and fed carry-ons into some kind of pollen scanner. He stuck his hands in his belly pouch pocket, fingering his wallet until he was next in line.
They weren’t in there a second before, he’d bet on it, but just as he said he had nothing to declare, his hands touched the fibrous shell of some kind of big seed in his pocket. More of them fell out when he took out his wallet. The inspector blinked and bent over to pick one up as he flipped up his hood and walked away fast.
He nearly bumped into a uniformed cop who was watching the passing tourists and holding up a sheet of paper with a crummy composite sketch of a skinny, ferret-faced kid with a wispy joke of a mustache. He backed up and walked by with his hand up over his face. When he was a good distance away, he turned and looked back and the cop was looking right at him and picking his teeth.
Zef ducked into a gift shop and used his last cash to buy sunglasses and a hideous pink ballcap that said ALOHA! He put them on and walked out and looked back at the checkpoint. Three inspectors were out in front of it picking up those seeds, but there was another station at the far end of the terminal. He walked fast, trying to stay close enough to one big family or another to pass for part of their group. Exhausted kids towing wheeled suitcases and dragging bodyboards kept tripping him up. He fought the urge to dropkick them.
A nervous eighth-mile hike later, he reached the next customs station and flashed his license. The ancient Japanese gentleman barely looked at it as he shrugged him through.
Fok. They didn’t seem to have his name, but they were legging the sketch around. So he wasn’t officially wanted, but the cops were looking for him on the down-low. If they combed the flight reservations, they would find nothing. The wait lists were not publically available, but they flashed on the screens at the gates every few minutes. He had a better than even chance of making it, so long as nobody recognized him.
Waiting next to the TSA guy at the security checkpoint, with his elbows resting on the amnesty box. Detective Bongwater yawned and dug around in his ear. He had a black eye and a splint on his nose. His wrinkled linen blazer bulged around the lines of a shoulder rig and a fat holster. He said something to the TSA agent as she vigorously frisked an elderly passenger, and she laughed and high-fived him. He took a butterfly knife and some prescription meds out of the amnesty box. Zef could read lips pretty well; the cop was saying what Zef was thinking: Nothing leaves these islands.
Backing up with the slowly creeping line between him and the cop, he went to a newsstand and picked up a magazine and pretended to read it. He saw two more uniformed cops by the doors.
All the blood drained from his head so quick he nearly fainted. His dick swelled painfully and swung like a dowsing rod to point across the terminal and down by the last Starbucks before the security checkpoint, where Pele stood naked and proud and defiant, jets of smoke curling up from her full, fiercely scowling lips…
No point in telling his dick that it was only Detective Doris, a premenopausal Polynesian woman pushing 230, currently sucking down a venti frapuccino like the antidote to a poison she’d been forced to take and rolling her eyes at her partner.
Amazing she’d even be here. Whatever happened the other night, she’d assaulted her partner and helped Zef escape and then knocked boots with him… because she was on her period and maybe possessed… But try and tell that to a jury.
There’d be no jury. He’d get double-tapped in a cane field and fed to the sharks, if they caught him. But she was here, and it was like he could smell the rich, overripe floral perfume of her bloody sex and he wanted to go to her so fucking bad, wanted to rub her like a magic lamp until the goddess came out to play. He tried to focus on her sweat-stained, flabby body and drab, indifferently styled hair, to picture her as a man, an old man with mutton chops, but it was no good. He still burned to ride her face like a bicycle.
Detective Bongwater started walking down the line, pausing to pop the lid on some confiscated medication. Tilting his head back, he cracked a capsule under his broken nose and snorted it.
Zef was almost to the door with a magazine over his face, learning about how a new patented bacteria promised to convert solid waste into edible and delicious meals for the homeless, and he crossed the concourse reading about the benefits of a $600 pair of noise-cancelling earphones that didn’t play music. He reached the doors and the sidewalk and the waiting row of taxis and courtesy shuttles without having to learn anything else. The uniformed cops and the skycaps were trying to get a stretch limo out of the taxi line.
A big ex-cop in a nice suit stepped in his path and took his arm. “Mr. DeGroot, we’ve been looking for you.”
“Well, here I am,” he said as calmly as he could manage. He could scream and they would drag him away, or he could just go with them and get killed. “Where we going?”
The ex-cop opened a hole under his mustache to answer. Zef kicked him in the balls as hard as he could. The much bigger man’s shiny black wingtips lifted a good three or four inches off the gum-streaked concrete.
Zef feinted back into the terminal, then juked around a passing luggage cart and made for the street.
A hand caught his flapping hoodie. Yanked him backwards off his feet. An arm like a python encircled his neck and lifted him miles above the ground. Breathing hard in his ear, blinking back tears, the ex-cop pulled him into the cowl of a payphone bank beside the doors. “My employer has an offer which will be of particular interest to you in your present situation. You can come with me to entertain his proposal with no obligation, or I can turn you over to the Honolulu police, who are under the misapprehension that you kidnapped and raped one of their detectives. What’ll it be, sir?”
As soon as Zef could breathe, he said, “Let’s go.”
The meal on the private jet was fucking excellent. Somewhere in the back of the plane, apparently, was a kickass sushi chef. Zef had hit the bathroom to puke up the McDonald’s and kept him busy the whole flight. He ate alone and watched extreme cage fighting from the Philippines on the satellite.
They landed at a tiny private airstrip on a bluff overlooking a rainforest. The stewardess and the sushi chef bowed to him as he disembarked. An even more formidable ex-cop escorted him to a helicopter that dusted off as soon as he got in.
Zef goggled out the window as the earth spun away and the airstrip vanished. He’d never seen so much green in his life. He couldn’t believe how undeveloped it seemed, after the jumble and stench of Honolulu. But then they passed over a terminator and the green was suddenly gone. Striated bands of naked metamorphic rock replaced the lush rainforests. Further south, the pilot told him over headphones that probably cost a lot more than $600 that the funnel of silver smoke on the horizon like a giant spliff blazing away in a crater was Mauna Loa. They circled over the volcano so Zef could marvel at fountains of lava spewing the raw, glowing stuff of creation out onto a landscape more desolate than the Mojave. This place wasn’t just new; it wasn’t even fucking finished, yet.
On a green, grassy plateau high above the nearest signs of human habitation, they touched down on a lava gravel pad behind a rambling McMansion that looked like the world’s biggest steakhouse.
An old smiling Hawaiian woman kissed his cheek and put a necklace of black kukui nuts around his neck. She led him inside via a service door to a weird locker room where a valet approached him dubiously and held out a shiny gray suit.
“Yo, like, no thanks, like what, I’m like, already dressed…”
“He won’t see you like that,” the valet said. Attached to the coathanger, in separate plastic bags, were a new pale blue button shirt, a green and blue striped tie, a new pair of black loafers, dark green nylon socks and a spotless pair of white jockey shorts, all carefully stripped of tags or labels.
Suit in hand, Zef bitched, “I don’t need new shorts, shit, yo.”
“Put it on,” the valet said, cool steel threats hidden in his words like pins in a new dress shirt, “all of it. He is superhumanly perceptive, and
very, very easily offended.”
“Who the fuck is he, anyway? Like…”
“Do not fuck with us. Put on the jockey shorts.” Now, he took out a tackle box and a little flashlight. “Smile,” he said.
“What the fok for?”
“Just do it.”
Zef grimaced and bared his teeth. While the guy looked into his mouth, he said, “He has an intense and irrational dislike of bad breath and tooth decay. Exhale.”
Zef blew in the guy’s face.
“Christ,” he said. He gave Zef a tooth brush, toothpaste, floss, a disclosing tablet and a mint. “Smile but don’t grin, and finish or swallow the mint before he comes in. You won’t want to be sucking or chewing anything when he sees you.”
Zef started to ask more questions, but stopped asking when he saw the contents of the tackle box. In little drawers and compartments like a well-organized fly-fisherman’s case, he saw assortments of individual false teeth and tubes of Super Glue.
The room was huge and furnished almost entirely in echoes. It felt like a museum. Tile floors, columns, floor to ceiling windows looking out on a pasture dotted with horses and cattle. A few things under glass set into the walls or in free-standing cases. Crowns and fans of feathers and beads from all over the world accompanied trophies and plaques and godawful works of “art” presented as gifts from grateful world leaders, celebrities, scientists, inspirational speakers and self-help gurus.
He immediately gravitated across the room to the largest, newest display. His heart dropped into his guts and hid behind his balls, which had crawled up into him at the sight of the exhibit under the fancy halogen pinlights.
Inside it stood the Captain America bike. The twisted front wheel, almost curled around the bent fork; the stars & stripes, gouged and crosshatched with dull silver, the shredded ruin of the leather seat. There was even a bit of blood on the grips and streaking down the crooked handlebars, right where he’d spilled it, only a couple nights ago.
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