Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

Three men got out of the car ahead, one of them cradling the gym bag. In the dark, Simon explained things quickly, relieving them of the bag.

  “Break up in twos. We’ll meet down at Kamoamoa Beach, fast as you can get there.”

  One of them hit the hood of the car with his fist. “Okay foah ditch da cars, but I no like dis park idea. Moah bettah we stay on da highway, hitchhike past da park. Keep going in original direction.”

  Simon clicked his teeth impatiently. “Listen, mate. That’s a roadblock ahead. Maybe they’re only spot-checking. On the other hand, maybe they’re waiting for us. Which of you wants to chance it, and get caught with this damned gym bag? You’ve got two assembled bombs in here with the nitroglycerine content equal to ten sticks of dynamite apiece.”

  Vanya stepped forward. “Simon. What do we do once we get to the beach?”

  He looked at his map again. “Trust me.”

  One of the men half smiled, took the others aside. “Smart buggah! I t’ink he got a boat waiting near da beach. Take us right along da coast, near Puna way.”

  They dispersed along the highway, sticking out their thumbs. Within ten minutes a couple picked up Simon and Vanya.

  “Not so good tonight,” the young man said. “Hasn’t flowed all day. Mostly you just see a red glow in the sky where the caldera is bubbling.”

  Simon leaned forward, making conversation. “How long does that lava take to harden?”

  The young man shrugged. “Hours. Days. Depends on what’s happening under the surface.”

  Exhausted, Vanya drifted beyond the range of their voices. When she woke, they were winding down the Chain of Craters Road, headed to the sea, passing huge, dead craters from past eruptions. The moon was full and in the distance they could see waves of frozen lava distinct against each other, more recent black flows shouldering older gray surfaces. Then they smelled gaseous, sulfur air, and in their headlights, saw the landscape change to a forbidding black moonscape. Vog turned the air thick, a cindery veil in the headlights’ scan. The driver’s wife ooh’ed and ahh’ed as the land turned spooky, cars ahead of them invisible.

  Simon rolled his window down, and the woman fairly squealed. “No! Night Marchers are everywhere. They reach in, rip off your cheek! One time they spun our car in circles, tore out the windshield. We were carrying pork sandwiches. They hate pig, you know.”

  He and Vanya sat back, staring at the bag between his feet. After almost an hour, they reached Kamoamoa. A mile of glittering black sand, the beach had been created three years earlier by the fury of boiling lava burying forests, rushing to cold seas. Exploding underwater like fireworks, the lava had fractured into tiny particles blown skyward, that were then thrown back to land. Now Simon stared at this stretch of sand brilliant as black diamonds.

  Momentarily forgetting the danger they were facing, Vanya scooped up a handful of black sand. “Exploded viscera of this island, it’s freeze-dried blood. It’s very fertile. Unfortunately, it also buries towns.” She shook her head. “Either developers get us, or nature does. Well, Simon, what now?”

  He scanned the sky, choppers hovering under clouds. One of them zoomed in, tilting and swaying in the dark, and it was like looking up at the outline of a thought, one’s state of mind embodied. Then he remembered how dawn would strike a sudden blow, rendering them both visible. He sank down on the sand immensely fatigued, as if understanding for the first time his lack, his human lack, even as a strategist.

  “I don’t know sweetheart. I’ve got to get my bearings.”

  Singly, and in twos, the others appeared, half jogging across the sand.

  Simon stood, addressing them apologetically. “Bit short on options, mates. Any ideas?”

  They stared at him, disbelieving, then backed away, arguing among themselves.

  One of them finally returned, his big chest heaving as he faced Simon. “No boat, right? No nothin’. Dis fuckin’ insane. We goin’ back da highway. Hitchhike Miloli‘i, help de ot’er guys. No more takin’ orders from one bullshit haole!” Three of them turned and walked away.

  Lloyd crossed his arms and studied Simon, then disappeared in the dark. After a few minutes he returned. “Simon. Da phones work ...”

  “What phones?”

  “Pay phones behind da rest rooms.”

  “Right. Who shall we call? The National Guard?”

  Lloyd hesitated. “Dis one long shot but ... I got calabash cousins, ovah Puna way. Maybe dey come get us in one boat.”

  Simon leapt up, grabbed him by the arm. “Christ, man. Try! Try!” He shoved change at Lloyd, dragged him to the phones, Vanya running alongside them.

  She and Simon sat on the sand as coins dropped down a slot. And they waited. A voice whispering. After a while the phone was replaced in its receiver. Then, minutes later, the phone ringing, ringing! like a squalling newborn in the dark. Lloyd’s voice whispering again, imploring. Then silence, as if he’d disappeared. The soft collision of Vanya’s hand in Simon’s, the inability to speak. Lloyd climbing out of the darkness round them.

  “Simon . .. not possible with boat, currents plenny mean at night, sweep us out foah good.”

  Simon thought a moment. “What about this bag? Could they pick it up? Get it to that plant by morning?”

  Lloyd sounded embarrassed, but somehow not defeated. “I asked. Cousins say forget it. No roadblock with no gym bag. Cops maybe lookin’ for dem, too.” He moved closer. “But listen, dey say maybe can help us. Can be waitin’ for us with a car.”

  Vanya stood up with a jolt. “Where?”

  He cleared his throat. “Ot’er side da lava.”

  “My God,” she whispered. “They want us to walk it.”

  “Walk . . . the .. . lava.” Simon shook his head confused, his brain cells jostling, settling into a new pattern. “How far? How many miles from this end to the other, over those buried towns?”

  “Eight maybe.”

  “Has it been done?”

  Vanya hesitated. “That kid on TV, did it on a bet. Took him just under seven hours.”

  “No miracle,” Lloyd said. “Last week friends walk two miles along da shore, lava plenty hard dere.”

  “It’s dangerous,” she warned. “People fall in crevasses, break legs. You think you’re on solid rock but it’s boiling lava below. Even on hard surfaces, it can erupt beneath your feet.”

  “We’ve got no choice,” Simon said.

  Lloyd jiggled change in his pocket. “So? Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He slipped back into the dark. The sound of coins dropping in the metal slot, the murmuration. Lloyd came running back.

  “Cousins say, ‘Can do’!”

  Simon checked his watch. “Almost nine now. Seven hours will put us across at about four A.M. The guy at the geothermal plant . . .” He scanned a blueprint of the plant grounds, an X marked where the fence had been cut. “... be waiting there at six A.M. Says that’s when guards change shifts, shoot the breeze. Give him a chance to slip in, plant the bombs, slip out. They should go off some time near seven.”

  They left the beach then, walking the road beside cars moving slower and slower, approaching the spot where molten lava first flowed across the park road in 1986, cutting it off, continuing to the sea. Now hardened lava, rippled like hills of elephant-skin ten and twenty feet high, covered the road for over eight miles, following the shoreline. Where the black edge of asphalt disappeared beneath lava, locals and tourists parked their cars, sat on mats and blankets, looking up at Pu’u ‘Ō’ō Vent, wondering if there would be eruptions tonight. Here and there little fires flared, brief as candles, but there were no big flows.

  “This end has had six years to harden,” Vanya said, as they began the arduous hike. “Right now we’re on solid rock, but see the steam snoring out of that hole? It means somewhere in the depths, things are heating up again.”

  They moved slowly, surrounded by flickering flashlights, people laughing, joking, the full moon making it almost light as day. Sim
on had the sense of walking across a black ocean that, half a mile out to his right, soared into black cathedral cliffs, then crashed down to the real sea. Now the sea was calm; blinking ships studding the horizon.

  The moon seemed close enough to stun, and Lloyd called out behind them. “Man, so bright you can run across dis stuff. No need foah flashlight.”

  They continued on, like people riding waves, undulating mounds of smooth pāhoehoe, then sudden ditches filled with jagged ‘a‘ā. Here and there, orange flags warned of heavy fumes, sudden crevasses, places where the surface thinned like eggshells. There was a pervasive sulfur smell, but the air was clear of vog. Now and then, up on the mountain, things exploded into flames, ohia trees, abandoned houses, then died out like stars. Here below, only occasional pinpoints of light, tourists tripping across the lava. Vanya stumbled, nearly going down. She caught herself, stood still, taking stock of her nerves. The night was cool, December cool, yet she felt feverish.

  She heard a sudden groan, and spun around, the spin leaving her so dizzy, lava seemed to twist and writhe, a great snake she had awakened.

  “Lloyd?” She flashed her light, moved back in his direction. Simon leaned over him stupidly, and Vanya thought how little use one man can ever be to another, really.

  “Ahh, man, look dis stuff,” Lloyd cried. He was on his knees, trying to free a foot that seemed buried in the rock. “So thin went right t’rough da surface! Sneaky, yeaah?”

  A couple approached in neon cycle suits, miners headlamps and pink kneepads. They shone their lights on Lloyd.

  “Need help, dude?”

  He struggled, freed his foot, and yelled at them. “Get the fuck off our island, ‘dudes’! Dis ain’t Club Med. People’s homes are buried underneath yoah haole feet!”

  They swaggered on, shiny and vulgar.

  A cloud sailed in, bringing total darkness so that things seemed to unexist. In that moment there was no conscious order, only morose ticking of the distant sea. Simon went into a time spin, his body dissolving in an almost mystical state of nothingness. This was the hour he dreaded most, when the enemy was close. He knew the Vietcong by their breath, the smell of fish fermenting in their guts.

  “Vanya ...”

  “I’m here.”

  He spun back to the present. “What’s that godawful smell?”

  She shone her flashlight on a pile of rotting fish the sea had flung up in a storm. Clouds dissolved, the moon shone through, they moved slowly on, like high plains drifters, cautious, squint-eyed, surveying uncharted, unpeopled land. They were more than a mile out on the lava now, leaving crowds behind. Suddenly a forest of huge, twisted steel girders loomed up at the sky, eerie and forbidding.

  “The Park’s Visitor Center.” Vanya played her light across the awful skeletons. “Lava flow of ’89 took that. A million dollars. Gone.”

  They moved on, over a now-buried, but once heavily populated subdivision, Royal Gardens, beyond that, little buried towns, refuge of old-timers who had lived the old-time ways. The moon moved closer, and it was like walking across silver. Crevasses appeared, large enough to swallow human bodies. They skirted holes, creeping along in half-squats. Here and there, hard lava stood up, gruesome and confused, like futuristic buildings half-built and half-collapsed.

  The burned-orange metal of a school bus protruded its full length, like something prehistoric floating in a lake. Stark totems of charred, denuded palms rose stoically, but in their midst, a tiny island of young, green palms bent and squeaked like infants. Molten lava had mysteriously forked round them.

  Vanya knelt at a patch of ground beneath a palm. “Simon, look!”

  He saw where her light was trained. In the midst of hunks of lava, charred branches, earth, there was actual movement, ants, tiny bugs.

  “You see,” she whispered. “Life prevails.”

  They pushed on, three miles, four, the landscape changing from smooth pāhoehoe hills to treacherous ditches and ravines. They were entering the heart of the destruction, where lava had flowed the deepest with greatest surge and fury. They moved cautiously, stopping, backing up when earth beneath them creaked, the sound like bacon crackling. It meant the surface was flaky and thin. Sometimes on their knees, they tested ground ahead with their hands, then carefully placed their feet there. Sometimes, they stood still, panting.

  Now, they stood at the very core of volcanic destruction. Since 1983, two-thousand-degree rivers of torrential molten lava had swallowed everything here in their paths. Sometimes flowing easterly, sometimes westerly, lava had consumed highways, cemeteries, sacred heiau, churches, homes, whole towns.

  “We are standing,” Vanya said, “on genealogies.”

  She moved reluctantly feeling flashes of history beneath her feet, generations of fishermen dragging in nets mending them by torchlight farmers plowing modest fields wives tending supper-fires sweat pearling mahogany shoulders bent heads at table shared blood sharing food births burials graduation-lū ’au dancing and the slap of feet clicking of mah-jongg tiles against the sizzz! of Primo drunk from cans and ’ukulele mandolins harmonicas whining down the years crazy shadows dipping acrobating on tent walls men gambling fighting-cocks killing with a kind of grand-ness and smells red earth torch ginger fresh dung the yeastiness of earth.

  Kalapana. This is a village I remember being a girl in. She shivered, memories so close to the surface she seemed to hear voices below her. She smelled their food.

  “We ate here one day,” she whispered. “Sushi and Cokes. Pono was taking us to see the old Lava Tree Park down the highway. She bought fresh anthuriums and ohelo berry jam from the sushi man. I think I’m standing right over his store. Do you hear him, hear his kids’ voices?”

  Lloyd moved close, looked into her face. “Vanya. No more sound ‘cept us. You hearin’ heat ghosts.”

  He and Simon flanked her so they advanced across the lava like a careful wedge. She could not seem to separate what they were carrying in the gym bag from what had already happened here. They were moving across destruction, to destruction. They were delivering the destruction. Something rode her plasma, overtaking her. Guilt. Maybe loss of courage. What am I doing? This is what they want. They want Hawaiians to self-destruct. She looked seaward, toward huge cracks in lava cliffs, like water-parted hair. She felt thirst, great thirst. Her feet hurt, her lungs hurt, she ran deeper into herself.

  Suddenly the earth shook, the sky exploded, Vanya was flung facedown. Simon threw himself across her protectively, gym bag in one hand, the Walther in his other, waving slowly, left and right.

  Lloyd looked up at the sky. “Oh sheet, man, New Year’s Eve!”

  A living circus of careening lights, giant pinwheels, starbursts. A screaming green that grew into a palm tree, took up the entire sky, then sagged, melting into what looked like awful mouthwash. Catherine wheels, Roman candles, rockets in twenty colors, it went on and on, dwarfing the small embers of Pu’u ’Ō’ō Vent that occasionally burped flames. Then, the largest, loudest fireworks, an American flag, reds, whites and blues, stars and stripes laid out across the universe it seemed, saluting the new president-elect. Its sound was deafening, it made the night bright as noon and in that moment, Simon looked across the black, forbidding land.

  “What the devil . . . ?”

  The lava was carpeted with what looked like air crash victims, humans sprawled like the dead, others sitting, kneeling. Within arm’s reach of Simon an elderly couple got up from their knees, embarrassed. Before them was a little altar, joss sticks and a Buddha. Simon stared at them, astonished.

  Vanya whispered, pulling him away. “Leave them. Leave them.”

  “Dey prayin ovah dere house,” Lloyd said. “T’ings dey left behind.”

  “In the middle of this blackness?” Simon asked. “How would they know where . . .?”

  “Dey know.”

  Incredulous, Simon switched on his flashlight, swung it in an arc. Across the landscape, dozens of faces looked up, then looked away. He quickly
switched it off.

  “Lava refugees,” Vanya said. “They come and sit for hours, even nap. They dream they’re watering their lawns, tending their orchids. I’ve seen old men out here with wheelbarrows of fertilizer. They bring flowers to their cemeteries. They lie on blankets, the wife crochets, they talk about roofing, a water heater, a new car. One man had saved two years to buy an indoor toilet. He used it once before the lava came. Most of them weren’t insured. Companies refused them, they were too close to volcano country.”

  They could hear murmurings across the rock, people mourning their ghost village, their buried lives. Clouds bunkered down, the night went black, and they moved on. Finding solid ground, Simon lowered the gym bag, turned to relieve himself, and tumbled down and down. In Vanya’s flashlight scan, he looked like a sacrifice at the bottom of a charred pit, a shallow ditch of jagged ‘a‘ā.

  Slowly, laboriously, he climbed back out, shirt sleeve shredded, his arm full of lacerations. “It’s nothing, few scratches.”

  He picked up the bag, opened it, and checked. Timers, bomb cases, initiating charges, explosives, fittings, everything intact, nearly assembled, only the timers needing to be set. He pulled out a canteen, took a swig of water, offered it to Vanya. She drank greedily, passing it to Lloyd. While they rested Lloyd ripped off the bottom of his T-shirt in a circle, wrapping it round Simon’s arm. “You bleedin’ plenny, man. Watch out, da heat ghosts don’ get you. Dey like haole blood.”

  Simon slapped his back. “Let’s move.”

  Hours passed. And miles. Exhaustion had set in; they could hear each other’s breathing, hear their pounding hearts. Their eyes itched from dehydrated sockets, their nostrils burned from sulfur. There was the sense of limbs like giant sausage-skins weighted with wet sand. They pushed on until eventually, by some subtle change, the sense of going downhill, they knew they had passed the deepest part of the lava. A slow leveling was the sign that they had left the buried villages behind, left them to their mourners—shadows still occasionally weaving past, like stragglers in the evening passagiata of small Italian towns.