Only a mile down the road, feeling no one following her she looked out toward the volcano. There at the scenic outlook overlooking Halema'uma'u crater she stopped a moment, out of some long lost respect. Some kind of perverse curiosity led her out of the car to the short rock wall at the edge of the two hundred foot cliff. Looking down, she could see the path, still closed, that she had led me down.
I moved in close to her, at her very shoulder as she looked at the very edge of the large lava pit, where she had decided to push me in, to kill me. This close I could feel so much more of her mind, so much more of the energy she had within her.
Her vibe felt different lately, different than the first day I was dead. Something was changing inside of her, some sense of hope twisted deeply with the despair. I still didn't have any idea why I was still lurking here when others like me had moved on in the stream, like Private Thomas Jacoba. I took a moment to look up in to the sky and saw that the light there was a little closer than before. This of course wasn't the sun, it was something entirely different, it was where Ms. Debbie had returned to. I found it more intense than the sun and as different from the sun as I was now different from Jimmy Turner.
Suddenly Janet started to sob. Heavily. Heaving her shoulders. She had to lean on the railing for support as grief washed over her.
An elderly lady close by moved in to comfort her out of some immeasurable amount of kindness. I feared Janet would rebuff her, but I was wrong. I think she probably didn't even notice.
Several minutes later, when the rain moved in again, and the kind lady's husband pulled her away, Janet stood tall for a moment and walked back to her car.
Minutes later she was turning left on the Belt Highway and making her way to the Hilo airport.
~~~
Alex's phone rang a full three times before he or Larry noticed it. The shock of meeting Janet and the inevitable demise of Private James Turner were weighing heavy on them.
Finally Alex snapped out of it and picked up in the middle of the fourth.
“Kilauea Military Recreation Area, Alex.”
“Alex, this is Sergeant Johannson. Is Private Turner standing next to your phone by some miracle?”
Alex paused as Larry turned around and gave Alex a salute with the question on his face of 'Is that the Sergeant?'
“No he is not, I'm afraid to say.”
“Damn it! Why not?” she demanded.
“I...”
Johannson interrupted his excuse, “Save it! I didn't really think he would.”
“Look, Sergeant,” Alex wanted to explain. “We never saw James Turner. In fact, we haven't ever seen him. We thought we were dealing with him but it turns out to have been a woman masquerading as him, perhaps his wife.”
“What the hell?” Johannson yelled. “Where's my soldier, then?”
Larry motioned that he was going to Cabin #94 to get the red headed girl to hurry on up to the phone.
“Larry, the guy who first delivered your telegram, and I have a bad feeling about the Private. This girl who says she is the Private is in bad shape. Drunk, sick, looks like a walking corpse.”
Alex waited for a response but only heard silence. He continued.
“She's supposed to be here any minute to talk with you.”
“Oh, really? This masquerading wife of his is going to do what? Pretend she is him, to his own Sergeant?”
Just then Larry ran back into the office.
“She split! Took off, car is gone and her bags too!”
Alex stared at Larry for a moment, feeling like an idiot for thinking she would show up. Reluctantly he told the increasingly angry Sergeant on the other end of the phone.
“Yeah, no shit! No matter, I have military police on their way already as well as what armed Rangers I could find. They should be there, in your office, any moment. Please do show them around. The airports are already looking for anyone using Private Turner's ID.” Sergeant Johannson continued, “And Alex...”
Alex stood up now, three burly Rangers already entering his office. “Yes...”
Sergeant Johannson was furious but had planned ahead anyhow. She knew she couldn't rely on a civilian to carry out orders in any predictable manner. Two days had been wasted waiting on this guy to get a simple message to someone who evidently was never there. She took a deep breath and finished her sentence.
“Never mind.” The phone went dead.
~~~
Janet was speeding, which she knew wasn't a brilliant idea, but she was scared and couldn't keep her foot under control. The traffic was light, but so was the rain, and the roads were getting a sheen.
Finally, her luck, what little there may have ever been, ran out with the entry onto the road of a school bus. She hit her brakes to keep from running into the big fat diesel exhaust pipe, but wasn't going to make it. She swerved into the oncoming lane to possibly go around, but a tour van was coming up quickly.
There wasn't much to do but to swerve back into her lane, behind the looming butt of the bus, downshift to low and keep on the brakes. She felt the tug of deceleration and soon felt her tires grabbing some pavement but pulling hard to the right. The bus was rapidly accelerating, probably having seen the speeder coming up fast, but it was too late for Janet's rental car, now with the front right tire in the soft jungle mud.
The steering wheel came out of her hands demanding to follow the front tire into the shallow ditch between her and the Ohia forest a few meters to the side. In a matter of some small slices of one second, Janet pushed the air bag remnants out of her face and watched in some fascination as the big yellow school bus continued down the road. The tour van passed her going the other way and never stopped. It was like she didn't exist. No one else's little bubble of reality had been sufficiently disturbed to stop and help.
Janet could see a whole lot of mud and ferns up on her windshield, but when she tried to open her door, the mud and ferns there prevented it. Rolling down the window she looked out and saw she was nicely plowed into a ditch that would require a tow truck and more motivation than she might ever be expected to muster.
The rain had at least let up a bit she noticed, so she began climbing out of the window with her one bag. She had to crawl up the steep embankment to the road, her hands, knees and feet now muddied.
Finally on the edge of the pavement she turned to look at her car. The two front tires were flat as well, and the side window on the passenger's side was broken.
“Great, just fucking great!” She looked in both directions. The stretch of road ahead of her was empty and the hill behind her hid whatever might not be there. Nothing and no one. Pulling the Army cap down low on her head, she continued walking in the direction she had been going.
Her shoes were shedding the mud slowly. With little traffic she felt safe walking on the edge of the pavement. Breathing a little more normally now, she could hear the Coqui frogs chanting in the deep cover. Large ferns lined the edge of the jungle protecting the darkness behind them from the casual view of anyone cruising down the road.
Something made her focus on the sounds. It sounded strong and it sounded, she thought, as if it were running straight for her. Coming quickly through the woods was a mass of heavy rain, pounding the Ohia and Koa trees. The curtain of dense rain crossed over onto the road, making it sing. Instantly she was soaked. Her Army cap held the deluge away from her face, similar to how a snorkeling mask did underwater. In true tropical fashion it actually got a little warmer with the rain.
“Perfect! Just perfect!” Janet was yelling holding both arms high up in the air, daring the gods to strike her down.
A car she never heard passed her from behind and hit the brakes, stopped and backed up to her, window slightly down.
“Hop in, I'm going to Kapoho.”
Janet stared at the older woman inside of an old Toyota Tercel. She had beads in her hair and was wearing some kind of hippie print dress
“I wasn't hitchhiking,” Janet deadpanned.
“Well, you should be! Hop in before you get run over.”
Janet stood and stared another long moment, almost in a daze. However, when the lady put the car back into first gear, she rallied and reached down for the door handle.
“Honey, you're soaking wet,” the lady exclaimed, seemingly surprised. “Reach into the back there and get my beach towel. I won't need it now anyhow.”
Janet couldn't quite read this lady. Did these rural people really pick up strangers in the rain? “Thank ... thank you.”
The Toyota struggled through the first few gears getting back up to speed, before the lady let it coast a bit in the heavy rain
She looked at Janet for a long moment before watching the road again. “Who you running from honey? Not that it's any of my business. I just want to know who might be coming up fast in my rear view mirror.”
Janet immediately turned around to look behind them, but saw nothing, but heavy gray rain.
“Seriously, is someone looking for you, now?” The lady looked in the mirror herself and sped up a bit.
Janet looked over at her again and saw something friendly, something that moved her to the first bit of honesty in months. “The military, I guess.”
The lady looked up at her haircut again and then back to the road.
“OK,” she said, pausing just a moment. “So where are you going then?”
Janet fidgeted a bit with her bag. These were sure a lot of questions. The rain was still coming down hard and she would rather ride than walk, even if the questions were coming fast.
“The airport. Hilo I think is what they call this one up ahead?”
The lady looked at her again with a bit of a confused expression. “The airport honey? Are you kidding? The military will certainly have that covered don't you think?”
Janet had not considered that in her haste to leave Cabin #94. No doubt they would have police looking for her soon. They would find her abandoned car and soon figure she had caught a ride to Hilo.
“So where are you going, again?” Janet asked, trying hard to smile just a little.
“I'm going home, to the Kapoho area.” She looked at Janet one more time before putting on her right blinker for the turn into Pahoa town. “You're welcome to come with me. I live with several old hippies you might find interesting. Some of them are still on the run, some forty years later.” She laughed out loud.
Janet felt ten thousand weights lift off her chest. What she needed right then was a good idea, and here was an excellent one. “OK, that sounds good.” She looked at the beads in the lady's hair again, they gave her hair a rainbow of colors. “I'm James...” she coughed a little. “I mean Jimmy.”
The lady looked over at her again. “Jimmie with an ie on the end?”
Janet nodded.
“Cool, I'm Starshine Aloha.” In another moment she turned the old Tercel sharply to the right and punched the reluctant accelerator as they found a good long stretch of downhill road ahead of them. “Nice to meet you Jimmie,” she said fidgeting with the windshield wipers. “You can just call me Star.” She looked down at her car and punched the dashboard slightly, “I think I've got at least one headlight working.” She was right.
Janet saw the dark blue of the ocean ahead at the bottom of the long road they were on. Star glanced over and caught her looking.
“We live at the end of the road. I'm going swimming at Champagne pond before dark. You want to come along?” Star asked.
The clouds seemed to be lifting as they descended from the higher altitude Belt Highway, the rain suddenly disappearing. Janet could feel the air warming up as well. The road was increasingly lined with pregnant coconut palms, guiding them toward the sea.
“Do you live near the ocean?” Janet whispered, incredulous.
Star smiled. She flipped off the windshield wipers and rolled down her window, letting her hand surf the airstream like a kid. “Yes. Yes we do Jimmie.” Star took a long deep breath of the fragrant air, something Janet was doing as well, having rolled her window down as well. Star always loved going home and probably loved it more when she could share it. Proudly, she announced to her new friend their destination.
“We're headed for the very edge of paradise.”
15
Paperwork would kill her before the Taliban ever did.
Sergeant Johannson hated it as much as any enemy sniper, perhaps more so. At least she could make an enemy sniper go away. AWOL, Absent WithOut Leave, was bad enough, but going AWOL to miss a deployment was far worse. Yet, you could still top that by going AWOL to miss deployment to an active war zone. Old timers called that desertion in the face of the enemy, garnering a death penalty.
Modern America didn't pursue that but the Sergeant could see the point. If one man fled and made it more difficult for the others to survive, an argument could be made for manslaughter. She would be one head short on this deployment because of the absence of Private James Madison Turner. She wrote his name out with disgust and a rapidly fading spark of compassion.
One man short meant everyone had to pull a little extra weight until a replacement could show up, if one even did.
“Turner,” she spoke softly to herself. “You better be dead.”
~~~
Still I followed Janet.
Still I didn't quite know why. It made me think for a moment whether I had become what we had always called ghosts. Maybe. Maybe I was in that Catholic thing called purgatory, but not having ever set foot inside a Catholic church, I wasn't sure. My Catholic friends had talked about it once or twice, just enough for me to understand it meant something like being stuck.
The light above me had moved a bit closer, so I had that feeling that whatever it was I was in, it wasn't going to last that much longer. Funny though, I didn't care a bit about the delay, nor did I dread the inevitable whatever it was coming my way. I simply went with the flow of things, and honestly I wished I had enjoyed that freedom when I had been alive.
Janet and her new friend Starshine Aloha had made it to the small grouping of very modest dwellings she called home. They were haphazardly placed between towering coconut palms and rested on a thin layer of sand just above the hard lava. Papaya trees decorated the space beneath the canopy with brightly colored fruit.
“Look Jimmie,” Star said pointing them out. “Breakfast in the morning.” Janet, I could tell, was in better shape now. The static from her mind was missing now, her muscles seemed less taunt.
“Everyone must already be at the tidal pools. We're going to a heated one just off the Champagne pools.”
Janet tried to figure out how a tidal pool could be heated, but finally gave up and asked, “Heated?”
“Oh yeah. We're pretty close to the volcano, as you know. And, all that mountain rain has to go somewhere, much of it underground into lava tubes, where the rock is perpetually molten or almost so. Eventually, it exits to the sea still hot. This little place we're going has a perfect mix of cool seawater and heated rainwater.”
Janet was quiet for a few minutes, standing there in a strange, but wonderful place, unsure of her luck. She clutched Star's beach towel tightly to her chest.
“What's wrong, honey?” Star whispered. “Here, take this new towel. Do you need a swimsuit?”
That question broke the spell but released a fair amount of embarrassment. She took the fresh towel and admitted something she had never thought she would ever be ashamed of. Star had to get her to repeat it, and she did, this time slightly higher than a whisper.
“I've never been in the ocean.”
Star looked at her for a long time, amazed to have met someone who had never been to that part of heaven. She felt an upwelling of compassion for this messed up young person.
“Ah, then this will be very special.” She turned to hang her car keys on a hook and grab a towel herself. “Full moon tonight too, how fortunate you are indeed.”
Star reached into a trunk just inside the porch of her place and pulled out a long oversized t-shirt. “Y
ou might not have a swimsuit, or you might not need one. Either way, here you go.”
Some moment or two later she and Star were walking toward the sea, just before dark and I found myself moving above the trees.
To the east the horizon shimmered under the weight of the approaching moon, ready to burst forth any instant.
Suddenly, in the dark air ahead of me came a shock, a rush of blackness.
Seemingly just ahead of the moon's light, racing ahead, was something from the mainland, to the northeast. Something I could feel as much now as I might have when I was alive - a warm wind. A sudden burst of grief from across the sea just before the moon crested the horizon.
Instantly I was there. Trying to comfort her, impossible as that was. I had to close my eyes, as it were, when I saw that it was my Mom reading my Facebook posts.
~~~
Agatha thought that she might never breathe another breath. She had gone onto Facebook to pull up some pictures of Janet and I, to show Adam.
The little bar on Lake Tahoe Boulevard had two computers with Internet access for the price of two Coors Lights. Adam liked that. He could use two cold brewskis while Agatha went hunting around for pictures.
As the second beer washed away the day's dust he noticed Agatha crying at the computer. Walking up behind her he saw Facebook was open.
“Honey, what's wrong?”
Agatha couldn't talk, having just now only caught her breath. She dragged her finger across the screen to point out something. Finally, Adam saw it.
Jimmy Turner: “I just wanted to let you all know that I am dead.”
Death by Facebook Page 8