Down In The Valley

by James Strauss

  “Detached motivation,” Arch answered. “One car doesn’t start, you have a half an hour to make a half an hour trip so you use the other car available instead of mucking with the dead one. If they wanted to plant a bomb they’d have put it in this one without giving us another. And if they did what they obviously did, then we’ve probably got a few more surprises coming.”

  “Man, you evil thinking,” Matisse, responded, laughing into the wind.

  “No, he’s just smart,” Ahi said from the back seat, his voice barely audible over the noise of their passage.

  It took twenty minutes to get to the outskirts of Haleiwa, mostly because the tourists blocked the road at Turtle Beach to cross and see the many animals there. The authorities had made it as difficult to pull over and screw up the traffic as possible, but their efforts made little or no difference. On the weekend, the wait was at least ten minutes just to get by the hundred-yard stretch of Kam Highway, without killing or maiming anyone. Matisse took the first turn off instead of using the bypass to come at the town from the other side. The Haleiwa Café was near the far end of the town.

  When the car was slowed to five miles an hour by the downtown traffic on the narrow two-lane shop covered road, it became quiet enough inside the car to be heard.

  “I love driving through town,” Matisse pointed out. “We got plenty time. People love my car. They all smile and wave.”

  “Yeah, all your great local friends,” Arch said, acidly.

  “Many people love Makaha, Matisse, but they have difficulty showing true affection,” Ahi concluded.

  As the car went past the partially closed Matsumoto Shave Ice General Store, an unmarked gray van pulled out from the side of the road into the side of the Pontiac. The van caromed away, and then took an immediate right down into Longs Drug Store parking lot. Matisse jerked the wheel to keep from having a head on accident with an oncoming truck.

  “Pakatadi,” Matisse yelled, using an virulent Japanese epithet.

  He steered the Pontiac to the side of the road and stopped, with Arch leaning into his right shoulder, having barely avoided his arm being ripped off from the van’s impact. He cradled his damaged hand against his stomach.

  “You okay, Ahi?” Matisse inquired, looking back.

  “It seems your friend was correct,” Ahi said, seemingly unhurt and unmoved by the crash.

  Matisse accelerated the Bonneville back into the traffic but turned right down into the Long’s lot. The van had been held up in traffic. They all saw its taillights blink red as it turned into the loading alley behind the local drug store. Matisse blasted the Pontiac forward, ignoring tourists jumping away on foot, and seemingly oblivious to the many moving cars in the lot. He pulled past the alley and stopped the car violently, driving them all forward inside the passenger compartment.

  “For Christ’s sake Matisse, what in hell are you doing?” Arch complained, his hand once again painfully jostled.

  “I see the bastard,” Matisse answered. “He’s sitting at the end of the alley. He’s blocked by the dumpster. Got him. Nobody does that to my Bonny! Nobody! I show them some demolition derby driving trick. You hit them with back of car, not front or side. Then you can keep driving. Ha ha!”

  Matisse gunned the Pontiac and threw it into reverse. He pulled into the alley, one arm swung over the seat, his neck craning around and accelerated the Bonneville. With both Arch and Ahi yelling “no” at the same time the car flew backwards and straight into the rear of the van. Arch and Ahi had time to duck down and allow the seats to take the full force of the impact. The van flew up, sideways and then into a nearby palm tree. Matisse pulled the Pontiac a few feet forward.

  “Now we mash ‘em into pulp,” he cried vengefully.

  “Stop,” Arch commanded, grabbing the steering wheel with his good hand.

  Kurt’s head appeared above the lip of the driver’s side window on the van. His fingers clutched over the open window’s edge. He stared with huge eyes at the Pontiac’s twisted rear end.

  “Enough,” Ahi commanded Matisse, joining Arch in trying to stop the man’s obvious rage.

  “Fine. Just fine,” Matisse said, in a forceful but pouting tone. They wreck my car and that’s it. I’m tired of everybody wrecking me and all my stuff and getting away with it.”

  Arch took his hand from the wheel and patted Matisse softly on the shoulder. “You’re right. None of this is your fault. I am your friend, and I want to thank you for all you’ve done.”

  “Really?” Matisse asked, in surprise. “Really?”

  “The van was to destabilize us, not to hurt us, at least not to hurt us much. Let’s go. You think the car can make it, we’ve only got a couple of minutes and those bastards will probably leave if we’re not on time. This whole routine is called “take the pebbles from my hand.”

  Matisse eased the car forward experimentally. “She’ll do. Tough car my Pontiac, but somebody’s going to pay to make her look like Queen Emma again.” He moved the vehicle gingerly through the Long’s lot and back into the Haleiwa traffic. “What pebbles?” he asked, finally.

  “There was an old television show about a bunch of monks who were specialists in the martial arts. Every weekly show would open with a young acolyte being asked to try to grab three stone pebbles from a highly trained monk’s open hand. The acolyte could never grab them in time before the monk closed his hand. The opening segment always had the monk holding out his hand and saying “take the pebbles from my hand.”

  “Okay,” Matisse said, as they approached the end of Haleiwa and the café, “but what does it mean to us?”

  “It means that these people are trying to force us to be the acolytes, while they are the trained wise old monks,” Ahi answered. “It’s about psychology.”

  “It also means they want something from us or they wouldn’t bother,” Arch added.

  The run down café sat facing the road. It had an old western saloon-style front door, and a front portico that was nearly falling apart with wood rot, termite damage and decay. Matisse pulled alongside the building and drove down the thin dusty white alley to the parking lot in the rear. The dust wasn’t from gravel or dirt. It was from dried old reef material that’d been ground up and then spread to cover the dirt. There was little doubt that the general was inside the restaurant with plenty of reinforcement. Government-style black Chevy Suburbans, and even a thinly disguised Marine Corps staff car, were parked illegally on the grass of an adjoining empty lot.

  “This place remains the dump it’s always been,” Arch commented, getting out the car.

  “Maybe,” Matisse responded, “but it’s run by my friends.”

  “Of course, what a shock.” Arch said, shaking his head wearily, while leading them to the crummy building’s front door.

  Arch opened the ratty torn screen door, and stepped into a different world.

  The general and Virginia sat at their own table in the middle of the single room. The room was about the size of regular master bedroom in a tract home. The tables around the room were occupied by men and women who gave every appearance of being military, but were dressed like the general, in local Aloha attire. There wasn’t one male, of the fifteen in the room, who had hair more than an inch long. The other distinctive feature of the place was the obvious addition of white tablecloths on all the tables.

  Nobody in the place moved or said a word except for the general. He stood up and greeted them with a smile. “Table for five, just as agreed,” DeWare said, expansively holding out an open hand toward them with his palm facing up.

  “Take the pebbles from my hand,” Matisse whispered almost silently from just behind Arch.

  XIII

  Arch took a seat next to Virginia, who acted like he wasn’t there, staring at her upraised menu as if it offered something other than common island fare. Ahi and Matisse sat across from them with General DeWare holding court at one end.

  “Did we really come in here to eat at this hour?” Arch asked Virginia,
ignoring his own menu but allowing the waitress to pour him a cup of coffee. The waitress went on to fill all of their upturned cups without asking if anyone else wanted coffee. An ancient rock and roll song popular on Oahu in the sixties but heard almost nowhere else blared out softly from the kitchen: “Pearly shells, on the ocean, shining in the sun, covering up the shore…”

  “So what’s it going to be, more threats, or another attack by the two idiots we left bleeding back behind Longs Drugs?” Arch asked DeWare directly. Arch did not fail to note that Virginia hadn’t distanced herself from his right elbow, which was barely touching her own atop the rather small table. He looked up to see Matisse smirking back at him. He eased his elbow away from Virginia’s.

  “This is a ‘Q’ clearance conversation, Mr. Patton,” DeWare began, and you don’t hold that level of clearance. In fact I don’t think you ever held that level, and your two associates here have nothing at all.”

  “If you’re going to ask them to leave then I’m leaving with them, no matter what you order your Gestapo agents to pull next,” Arch replied, keeping his tone as unemotional as possible.

  “Just tell them,” Virginia said, putting her menu down in front of her.

  “I can’t tell you everything and besides it wouldn’t be in your best interest to know everything anyway,” DeWare replied. “Give us the room, “ he said in his general’s voice, turning to stare expressive around them.

  The restaurant cleared quickly, the waitresses being escorted out by some of the fake customers. In less than a minute the place was empty.

  “I’ve tried that before, but nobody left the room when I did,” Arch observed, his tone one of humorous wry disdain.

  “Perhaps, if you’d been a real general you might have had more success,” DeWare replied without any humor at all.

  “Okay, I can tell you this much, DeWare followed, his voice turning even more edged. “The plane at Bellows isn’t going anywhere. It was meant to fly something in that couldn’t have been brought in any other way. The pollution you’ve complained about is minimized and there will be no more of it. The escaped material would never register anything greater than a person might register receiving a couple of medical CAT scans. Virginia?”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Virginia said, nodding while she said it. We need the power to drive the communication streams among different points on the islands. But that’s it. That’s all we can say, and that’s probably too much. The plane needs to be left alone and any public interest in Bellows needs to go away.”

  “And Matisse and my people?” Ahi asked, his voice deep and serious.

  “Not my department,” DeWare replied immediately. “If they land at Bellows Beach they’ll be taken into custody and spend the duration of mission years in administrative segregation. If they fire on anybody, then they’ll die, all of them right out there on Rabbit Island.”

  The room went quiet. Arch watched DeWare and Virginia closely but said nothing.

  “Well?” Virginia asked impatiently.

  “Years? Islands? Communication streams?” Arch replied after a few seconds in complete surprise. “The mission is expected to last for years and it involves more than one island?” Arch stopped talking and stared at DeWare with a deep frown, not missing the fact that the general had steered very clear of mention the word radiation when he’d talked about pollution.

  “Shit,” DeWare stated tersely.

  “Don’t beat yourself up Horace, you’re not trained for this kind of reading between the lines and he is,” Virginia said, patting the general’s left hand lightly with her right.

  “Horace?” Arch and Matisse said at the same time.

  “Do you call him ‘Hor’ for short?” Arch asked Virginia, smiling back at Matisse’s gaping expression.

  “And my people?” Ahi broke in, his words delivered in the same slow drumbeat cadence as before.

  “What do you people want to get the hell out of here?” DeWare said, “All of you.”

  “There are eleven factions in the sovereignty movement,” Ahi answered slowly, his tone changed to a lighter more analytical one as he talked. “The sisters at the university have money and land. Bumpy in Waimanalo has power for his faction. The other islands have Ohana, some land and even a bit of money. What do we get?”

  “You expect the United States Marine Corps to write you a check? DeWare replied, angrily, “we’re right back where we started with all this. We can, however, lock the three of you up right now and throw away the damned key.”

  “We’re not exactly where we were,” Arch replied. “We know a hell of a lot more, like how badly you don’t need any of this to be in the media or all over Waikiki or even the other islands. You might lock me up, and even Matisse, but there’s no way Ahi is going away without a whole lot of public and private trouble.”

  “You’re lucky to get your lives, to keep your lives as you know them to be,” DeWare shot back in a deadly tone. “We gave you as much as we can and if you don’t like it you can go to hell.”

  “Three million dollars,” Virginia said, into the momentary silence, her big black eyes locked into Ahi’s own. They stared at one another while Matisse and Arch looked shocked and the general frowned to the point where his eyebrows met in the middle of his wrinkled forehead.

  The table went silent again as Ahi considered the obvious offer.

  “Land,” Ahi stated, flatly, placing one of his pie plate-sized hands on the table between them.

  “One block,” Virginia replied, “ about a quarter acre, on the edge of Kaneohe Marine Base near where that phony Earthtrust environmental outfit used to be.”

  “Bullshit,” DeWare hissed at Virginia, “you can’t give away military base property at your whim. That would take an act of Congress.”

  “Or a presidential order,” Virginia replied, turning her face toward him with a pleasant-seeming cold smile.

  “President?” Arch asked. “Other islands? Nuclear power plants flown in with unlikely leakage flowing out into the ocean? Communications of some weird higher order? What’s going on here? This isn’t any kind of mission I’ve ever heard of, much less been a part of. Next you’ll be talking about interplanetary war and UFOs.”

  DeWare and Virginia stared at Arch, without comment following, until well past the end of his quietly delivered tirade.

  “You’re not an agent anymore, so you’re out of it entirely,” DeWare finally responded while Virginia went back to looking at her cheap torn menu.

  “What do you want?” Virginia asked Arch, without taking her eyes away from the menu.

  “I want to make sure you’re safe and I want to know what’s really going on,” Arch answered, deliberately bumping her elbow to demand more engagement, “and I want you to tell me that there’s no alien bullshit in any of this. That UFO reference was meant to be a joke.” Arch said the words and waited. A cold feeling had become to form in the middle of his stomach when neither Virginia nor DeWare had batted an eye or taken his comment as being anything but serious.

  “Can she do it?” Ahi asked into the silence.

  “The Three million?” Arch answered with his own question. “Yes, if the president is playing on their team they can probably do whatever they want, assuming national security is somehow mixed into the bargain, or worse.

  “I accept under one condition,” Ahi agreed, “and that one’s easy. I won’t abandon my friends Matisse and Arch here since, having personal experience now, you people don’t seem to mind committing almost any act of violence to accomplish your unknown mission of mystery.”

  “If everyone follows the agreement we make here then no more violence but if there is any violation, and I mean any violation, then anything may happen, and you don’t have to abandon your friends, you simply have to stay away from them and out of it,” DeWare stated, spreading his hands to either side, as if welcoming such an unspecified violation. “You agree, Virginia?” he added with a fake smile, his unblinking eyes never leaving Arc
h’s.

  Virginia looked at Arch before slowly nodding her head slowly.

  Arch looked from DeWare to Virginia and back, still uncertain as to who was really in charge. Virginia’s uncommon reticence and her obvious lack of willingness to approve across the board violence only strengthened his resolve.

  “What about the Stairway to Heaven?” he asked of DeWare.

  “Shit,” DeWare hissed out again. “How in hell?”

  “Enough!” Virginia cut in between the vitriolic looks passing between DeWare and Arch. “That’s classified, and you damned well know it Arch.

  Stop baiting him. Give in and get the hell out. I don’t want or need your damaged, macho and entirely misplaced form of protection. You don’t ever stop violence. Wherever you go and whatever you do violence follows you around like Pigpen’s cloud.”

  “Me? Your people did this to my hand,” Arch replied, his tone more hurt than angry. “Your people smashed their van into our car not twenty minutes ago half a mile from where we sit. I didn’t do anything except come out here to see you. Instead I run into a weak-kneed substitute of a real Marine, and you put me back in play with a traitor for a partner and the two stooges acting like Keystone Cops trying to abuse me.”

  “You shot Lorrie in the hand, probably crippling him for life, and God only knows what shape their in back at Longs,” Virginia replied, her tone icy cold and deliberate.

  “We’re done here,” DeWare said, getting to his feet. “We’ve got a deal, if I can make the extortion thing happen with the land. You handle the money thing Virginia. I don’t want to know anything about that. And as for you Corporal Patton, or whatever your real appropriate rank was, I hope you stick up your ugly macho head again. Next time you’ll be at the other end of a Recon sniper’s bullet. The only reason you’re alive now is because I wouldn’t let that Apache take you out.”

  “And there you go again,” Arch replied, instantly, getting to his own feet. “Only the Army has Apache choppers and they don’t take orders from Marines. None of any of this should be happening in the real world.”