They turned west, doubling back up the wild, barren coast that Zef had just seen on the ride from Lahaina. The scenery looked like a drawing by a hyperactive child with only two crayons. He didn’t see anyone else on the boat besides Yeti and the geek. Was this a burial at sea? Zef figured he could take an old motherfucker with no legs, even if he did still outweigh him…
A powerful hand on his shoulder twisted his arm half out of its socket. He followed it, trying not to whine. The half-giant shoved him against the stern, bent him backwards until the spray doused his neck. The mighty inboard motor roared underneath him, making his ass go numb.
The sun was falling fast behind a miraculous wall of clouds over Lanai, like an oil painting in a church. The nearest boat was a toy on the horizon.
“You that motherfucker the cops want on Oahu, yeah? Tied up with Primo.” He said it casually, like it was no big shit at all.
“Yo, I barely knew that dude, man. I’m just here on vaycay, looked him up to party with, y’know, and…”
“And you touch down on Maui in a private chopper and with a quickness get into a running gunfight through Lahaina with Primo’s fucking cousin.”
“Yo, I wasn’t even strapped! And I didn’t know that fokker, either… All I know, like… Yo, where we going, man?”
“Depends.” Yeti smiled and let him go, trotted on his palms to check three big angling poles rested in scabbards off the stern. Their lines dragged in the wake, reminding Zef of getting clotheslined in Pearl City. Zef came up after him, looking for something to use as a weapon.
Yeti threw a balled-up rag at him. Zef shook it out and grudgingly put it on. A tattered, oil-stained T-shirt, it said KEEP THE COUNTRY COUNTRY.
Yeti laughed. “I gave it to you to wipe that shit off your leg.”
“Lemme borrow yours,” Zef said.
One of the poles bowed almost double. Yeti climbed up into the chair and snatched the pole out of the scabbard. “You know, a shark can taste blood on the water a hundred miles away. Follow the trail for days across open ocean to get at it. Course, by then, the open water is pretty full of other sharks, and they have a feeding frenzy. Tear each other up, turn the water to red shark soup. They don’t even like human flesh. They’d rather eat each other.”
Zef’s eyes involuntarily darted downwards. “Listen, it’s all just a big misunderstanding, y’know wha’m sayin’?”
“Yeah, I hear. You just on vacation.” Yeti laughed, winding the reel in. “You havin’ one shitty vacation, brother.”
“Hawaii hates me. But, like, you don’t have to…”
“Bullshit, brother. I think Hawaii trying to save you. I don’t have to do shit, except find out who you workin’ for.”
“I’m not working for… well, I’m like freelance…”
A big callused hand came up and caught his jaw. The other hand whipped the pole back into its scabbard. “Truth, or I take you fishing. You just the right bait for what I’m looking to catch.”
Zef looked back over his shoulder. The wake of the boat was a white carpet of foam paved over the jagged, dancing peaks of the deep blue sea. Something lurched up out of the wake, obscured by spray, impaled on Yeti’s hook.
“I’m working for, like some people in Vegas, y’know what I mean? Heavy hitters, yo. And, like, if I go missing…”
Wiping a tear from his eye, Yeti said, “You too dumb to be with the cartels, haole boy. So how come my cousins say you got picked up by that TV Doctor fucker?”
Zef’s poker face sucked.
Draining a beer in one mighty pull, Yeti dropped the flattened can in a recycling bin, belched, and took up the pole. “They treat us like furniture, so we hear everything, haole boy. Shit, that motherfucker owns almost as much of these islands as his fat hogbitch boss. Think he’s gonna be one motherfucking chief, and shit. What he want so bad, he gotta hire a repo ninja?”
Zef choked down the insult and tried to think about this. Every one of these fuckers was somebody’s cousin. He couldn’t think of a good lie, so he just said it. “Donny Punani.”
He expected the big amputee to blanch and change the subject like everyone else had, but Yeti took his hand off Zef and let him sit down. He stared into the sunset as he fought the big fish dragging in their wake. The wind lifted his white hair and made it look like fog around a mountain. “You know why fuckers call me Yeti?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. “Five-O did it to piss me off, but it stuck. I was the Abominable Snowman, no joke. One bad fucker, never convicted. I ran with the gangs because there wasn’t nothing else to do, like what a warrior would do in the way back. If you don’t want to join the Navy or play football, you can work in the hotels. Only reason we remember our culture at all is for shows for the tourists. So I connected these islands to the cartels and made it snow.
“We tried to flip it and sell only to the tourists and the squids and grunts. But the gangs over here were like everything else, just a franchise, bringing poison in and pumping all the money back to the mainland. One gang fronts for the Mexicans, another for the Japanese, now the Chinese want a piece. So fuck that shit. I walked away, and now I fight the real fight, against the real enemy.”
“Who’s that?”
“Ha! Against you people,” he said, with a smile. “I fight for kanaka maoli, the true people, to have our islands back.”
“That’s crazy, man,” he said, but something in his gut felt way past its expiration date, all of a sudden. Something the big man said… “So you fighting a revolution, like, or what?”
“Oh, we never gonna drive you out in a straight fight, but someday, the shit you sow gonna come to harvest, and America gonna be too busy keeping her own head above it to keep her thumb on the old bloods anymore. Queen Lilioukalani’s people gonna be free.”
“That’s cool, yo, like I’m with that, like fight the power, shit—”
“When the white missionaries came, they outlawed our culture, our sports, our magic and our gods. They made us believe we were savages, cannibals, because of what happened to Captain Cook.”
Zef nodded, didn’t ask who Captain Cook was.
“We cooked him,” Yeti winked, “but we didn’t eat him. We had stories about monsters who ate human flesh that we told to remind us, when the missionaries or the plantation overseers weren’t around, of what it really meant to lose your soul. Donny Punani is the kind of monster they thought they were saving us from.”
The boat had turned north. The sun went down behind the shoulder of Lanai and the sky turned purple. The coast flattened out and sported clusters of lanais and walled estates, a few stand-up paddlers working the lazy waves like raking the rows of a garden. The fear that he was going to get killed out here started to recede behind a cloud of utter incomprehension. What the fuck did this old geezer want?
Trimming the line, Yeti said, “Fucker’s getting tired. You look down there and you see all kinds of fish and the sharks just swimming among them, they seem to have no strife. But when you catch a fish, everything else in the sea come in to take a bite. If you not fast, all you get is the head.”
“So, like… It’s cool if I, uh…”
Yeti scowled. “Help me land him.”
“Who?”
With a growling roar, Yeti hauled on the pole and dragged a six foot blacktip reef shark halfway out of the water. Zef gasped, looking into its empty eyes, its gasping, blood-rimmed mouth. Holding it where Yeti showed him, he grappled its weight out of the water while Yeti got something out of a smelly bucket. “I can lift him in,” Zef said, but Yeti shook his head. “No, this one’s too small. I put him back. But first…”
Yeti held up something so the shark could see it, then dropped the big black pincushion—a sea urchin—into its mouth.
The shark thrashed against the boat like a hanging man. Though it made no sound, Zef could feel its agony.
Chuckling, Yeti cut the line and let the mutilated shark fall into the foam.
“If you think you can catch
him, then I’m cool.”
Zef stared into the water, waiting for the thrashing shark to leap back into the boat. “Well, like, I was supposed to have, like, a whole crew to back me up. That fok Yolo was supposed to hook me up with some fokking artillery…”
“Yolo runs—or ran, who knows—the ice kitchens on Maui, and his cousin Primo was the Mexicans’ favorite errand boy. He probably could’ve got you some guns. I’m not the Mafia. I’m more like the IRA or the Klan.” Yeti signaled to the old geek, who aimed them at the Lahaina waterfront. All the sunset booze cruises were coming back into port, blaring Iz and Don Ho.
Zef saw the parking lot across from the dive shop where he’d parked his car, about two hours ago. He probably had a fucking ticket…
Like half a gorilla, Yeti sprang up onto the gunwale and threw a rope to a kid onshore, who lashed it round a cleat and caught the next one as they eased up against the dock.
Night was falling fast and Lahaina had its lights on. Loud bionic dub rhythms blasted out of an open terrace nightclub across the street, making him feel halfway high.
Zef stood up, but Yeti perched on the gunwale, blocking his way. “You really wanna get him?”
He almost screamed, Hell no, but by now, he could kind of tell this wasn’t a trap. Everything was a trap. “It’s what I’m getting paid for. But like…”
Yeti steadied the gangplank for him, gave him a card. “Call tomorrow early, before eight. I gotta full-day charter. I’ll set you up.”
“Thanks, yo, I… thanks.”
Looking down at the swirling water, he saw shapes circling, bumping against the boat. They got a hard-on for me…
“You don’t know this place,” Yeti said, “and you got no friends, so you better loosen up and look out, because this a small island.”
“Where should I start looking?”
“Try right behind you, haole boy.”
Zef jumped. He saw no looming, grizzled homicidal Hawaiians among the thinning crowd of tourists looking to recover shit they lost on a cruise or submarine ride.
Yeti laughed. Zef flipped him the finger and walked up the steps to the sidewalk. And that’s when he heard it.
The techno dub had abruptly cut out at the terrace club on the second floor of the snooty restaurant across the street, and a plodding, colorless instrumental rendition of “No Woman No Cry” started to play.
Zef preemptively gagged. Fucking Hawaiians were worse than the Japs with their fucking sloppy, sentimental karaoke.
The singing started…
And this cavernous, gravelly, world-weary sound came floating out over the boulevard, and somehow, it was like nobody else had ever sung the fucking song before.
Zef crossed the street thinking, It can’t be, but he fucking well knew that it was. He may not remember anything else about that awful night, but he remembered the stony steel breeze of that voice, and the way the room immediately reeked of pussy juice.
He looked at the stairs in the restaurant—a too-white Italian seafood bistro—and he thought about going up there and he was off the curb and cutting between two honking cars under the soft lanternlight of the night and that voice, he wanted to fuck it, he wanted it to eat him—
A gaggle of women and girls jostled him running through the restaurant and up the stairs. He remembered what happened last time. He wasn’t strapped… as if he could even use a gun. He’d never shot anything bigger than a ground squirrel.
Just keep walking. He passed the restaurant and crossed back to the other side. An old woman running the shaved ice place swayed and cried.
He turned back and looked over his shoulder at the sound of a man shouting. A sweaty, drunk white guy dragged his wife down the stairs and onto the sidewalk, swinging and swatting at everything that ruined his date. His wife was crying, but Zef stopped to watch her turn her back to her husband as he tried to hail a cab, and masturbate sobbingly, leaning against a lamppost.
The woman next to Zef at the bar wouldn’t shut up. Something about this new self-help book, something else about Aspen this time of year. She was pushing sixty, but holding up better than his mum. Said she was on her honeymoon, like it was supposed to make him want to nail her.
“You pretty rich, then,” he said, unable to think of any way out of this conversation.
“I suppose some would say that,” she said, “but you know, it’s all about how you see yourself. Visualize, I mean. Like, the more houses and cars and things come into my life, the less it all means. I’m above it. You know, like homeless people, they’re clinging to their shopping cart of junk, or whatever, they’re—“
“Like Gandhi.”
“What?”
“The dirty Indian diaper-guy, like… Gandhi, but like, with a Lexus.”
“No, not quite. I’m like Gandhi because I have a Lexus. It’s not getting what you want, it’s wanting what you get. So, are you holding?” Her hand ran up his thigh to cup his package like testing grapefruit.
Zef squirmed. “I’m, uh, sitting on something if you…”
“My husband likes me to smoke up, because when I get relaxed, he gets anal. Of course, with you around, he probably won’t even notice my brown eye.”
“OK, listen…”
“Fine, he’ll just watch. But you’re only getting three hundred.”
He didn’t want to, but he forced himself to look her in the eye. Like in one of those old cartoons with the castaways on the desert island, when they look at each other and suddenly they turn into a hot dog or a hamburger; she was a stack of shrink-wrapped titties and ass cutlets.
When he opened his mouth, he might have drooled a little. “No, listen…” Wiping his mouth, “You can’t talk to men like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like they’re, like, things. Just because we like to fok doesn’t mean we can be bought, and if we can’t whistle and check out your shit, you should pay us the same respect. Shit like this is why people get raped, and read those fokking 50 Shades Of Twilight books, yo…”
Horrified like she’d been insulted by her horse or her dog, the lucky bride poured her drink in his lap and stormed out of the bar. A couple people laughed, but Zef took it in stride.
He could’ve taken her up on her offer. He had the room and car rental and about fifty bucks in cash after replacing his lost clothes and luggage. The big man’s people hadn’t returned his calls. He could’ve at least gone with her and stolen her purse, but something had gone bent inside him, or maybe it was just gone.
He thought of the yellow crap that came out with the drugs when Kalei “massaged” him. He didn’t feel any better or happier for having his “poison” extracted, he just felt empty.
The Hilton Kaanapali was like a Bond villain lair, modernist glass bubbles stacked against the forbidding black lava cliff at the north end of a too-perfect beach. His room looked out over a golf course. The room was reserved under Marlon Pussybone. He usually registered as Robert O. Saber or Roberto Sabor, both of which he could back with fake Nevada IDs.
He tried to relax with a little autofellation yoga, but something didn’t feel right. Usually, it felt as natural as jacking off or picking his nose. His penis ramming the back of his throat felt as natural as his own tongue; the taste of his semen was as familiar as his own saliva. But tonight, his dick felt like a stranger’s dick, which his dick liked very much, but which repulsed his mouth so that he threw up in a dry cleaning bag, then ordered a bottle of vodka and a pitcher of pineapple juice and drank until he passed out.
That night, he swam in the ocean, but he was not cold and he could see quite well, gliding through the water like a bird on the wing, short powerful strokes, and he could follow the burning trail that glowed for him like fire in the water.
Follow it into the shallows and the thin pair of legs like a crane’s, scaly and stringy and alone out in the moonlit breakers, and the tide rolling back tugged his prey off balance.
The wave recoiled and reared and the wave lifted him high abo
ve his prey who turned to look at him and dropped his joint and drink and he saw his own stupefied face, broken nose askew like a bony comma, eyes bugging out in disbelief and Zef opened his mouth wide and multiple rows of jagged teeth extruded out of his lipless grimace as he tore himself in half.
Yeti’s message told him to look for an old hippie who looked like Tommy Smothers, whoever that was. Zef wandered around the farmers’ market and crafts fair at Banyan Park in Lahaina. The park itself was little more than a village square with benches in circles around a grove of creepy trees like melted candles. The canopy of their shade turned the morning sunlight deep green but seemed to magnify the heat.
“It’s all one tree,” said someone behind him.
Zef turned and stepped back with his hands up. He’d gotten pretty good at reacting to fuckers sneaking up on him, this trip.
The geezer had chamois leather for skin and shaggy gray-blonde hair down to his shoulders and a scruffy, lopsided beard. He wore a threadbare aloha shirt with a luau scene on it, a lurid green sarong and cracked old OP sandals. There had to be some mistake. He was the least deadly looking motherfucker Zef had ever seen.
“The banyan tree starts there,” he said, pointing at the forking tower of gray trunks at the park’s center, “and it throws out root bodies that pop up as satellite trees.” He spun around to encompass the whole arbor, then leaned in close and winked. “It’s all one tree, man.”
Zef scratched his head and tried not to sound as stupid as he felt. “Kind of like… Like it’s all one ocean, or whatever.”
The old hippie put out his hand. “Right on, man. My name’s Paul, but everybody on the islands calls me the Hodad.” He shook Zef’s hand, grinned and gripped harder when Zef ripped out, “Fok!” and tried to jerk away.
“The locals call me Unauna,” he said, displaying a scaly, grayish claw with only a thumb and pinky on it. “Means ‘hermit crab.’”
Zef wiped his hand on his shirt, looking for a snack bar with wet wipes. “What happened to you, man? Shark bite?”
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