KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

  Over the West the same human occupation, roads and ski resorts and cities eating into battered forests, then the empty Utah and Nevada deserts crisscrossed by ATV trails, the over-logged California hills and a far hazy view of San Francisco, then hours of bright blue sea spotted with white clouds and their gray-green shadows. The sea seemingly empty of man, if you didn’t know better.

  Then whacked by the perfumed tropic damp air of Hawaii, watching the sun set through the oily volcanic fog, standing in line at Budget Rentals in Kona scratching my whiskers, over-dressed in the heat, renting an Altima for the long ride to Pa.

  It was a good half hour north on Highway 19 past miles of concrete hotels shadowing beaches that when I was a kid were miles of empty sun-bright sand. Then up the volcano to Waimea, where once was a country road you could wait hours on for a ride and is now a four-lane trashy highway.

  Shifting Baselines Syndrome, Lexie had called it. We think what we grew up with as the baseline, not realizing that most of what had been there was already lost. Soon we’ll lose the rest and barely notice.

  Like my being used to Pa’s being here, and now he’ll be gone. And how bad that is for him. To know that soon you will not exist.

  Same as us all. Just sooner.

  I bought Chinese takeout in Waimea and drove down the volcano’s north slope to Honoka’a then west to the Waipio Valley overlook. For those who don’t know it, Waipio is a deep tropical valley of 2,000 foot cliffs, verdant jungles, rivers and a few taro patches. A mile across and five deep, it shaped like a huge W with twin waterfalls at the back and a black sand beach facing the sea. A road snakes down the near cliff, in case you want to risk your vehicle, but rental cars aren’t permitted to venture down it.

  One of Hawaii’s most sacred places, Waipio was the boyhood home of King Kamehameha. Before the great extinction, when over 90% of Hawaiians died after the Europeans arrived, thousands of people lived in Waipio, but now it’s just a few loners like Pa.

  I left the Altima at the top, grabbed my backpack and hiked down to the valley floor two thousand feet below. Rather than follow the jeep trail I short-cutted past the heiau – the sacrificial pyramid – across the first and second rivers onto the Kamehameha trail. It’s a narrow path over volcanic rocks through forests of huge monkeypod trees. The Hawaiians call it the King’s Path, for Kamehameha, who vanquished his enemies and united the islands only to see them slide into white men’s hands.

  AT THE END of the King’s Path the trail hunches up through banana trees to a grassy clearing and tin-roofed bungalow with a screened porch in front and a chicken coop and fenced garden behind, a light in the kitchen making my heart leap to be seeing Pa, and an even sharper pain from soon losing him forever.

  He sat on the front porch in one of his old canvas chairs. Craggy and thin-faced, not like he’d been last time I’d come two months ago. He gave me a huge smile and pushing himself up wrapped me in his long arms. “Just like you said, you got here by sunset.”

  Hugging his strangely skinny shoulders I saw behind him the sea ablaze with billowing crimson clouds, the sparkling blue-green froth, the magnificent porcelain sky. “Just barely.”

  He sat roughly back down, the chair tilting. I dropped my backpack in the corner and sat beside him. “I brought egg rolls and grilled chicken. What you got to drink?”

  “You left that bottle of gin, last time you were here.”

  “Christ, Pa, you didn’t drink it?”

  “Hell no you know I like my own stuff.”

  “Your stuff would kill an elephant. No wonder you’re sick.”

  “Sick? When I think about this goddamn Agent Orange, what it’s doing to me, what it’s done to my friends, I wonder how has anyone survived over there in Indochina – not just Nam but Laos and Cambodia – we drowned them in that stuff.”

  I put a hand on his arm. It felt thin and cold. Chicken skin, the Hawaiians say. “So tell me how things are…”

  “Sometimes the pain’s real bad, sometimes not. They want to start me on morphine – that’s the beginning of the end, turns you into a vegetable…But the pain’s getting worse. Every day. They want me in the hospital but that’s no place to die.”

  “There’s no chance?”

  He looked at me humorously. “Of beating it? No chance. It spreads like wildfire, pancreatic cancer. Even now,” he pointed to the middle of his body, “feels like the whole place is on fire.”

  “Oh Jesus I’m sorry, Pa.”

  He nodded, said nothing. “Like what we did when we poisoned those three countries with Agent Orange then set them on fire.” He looked at me. “There is a connection, you know. Between what you do and what happens to you.”

  I shook my head, didn’t want to think about this.

  “Yes there is. I’m getting punished. For what I did.”

  This was a black cave with no exit. “You guys, you didn’t know what you were getting into. What you were going to be asked to do. If you’d known you never would’ve gone in.”

  He smiled. “Not unless you were a psychopath.”

  “In Afghanistan, me too, there were times… Iraq too. You pull down on some guy, and his whole life flashes before you, his wife and kids, his hut, his goats, that how he was brought up is why he’s here now and you take him down but he stays inside you.”

  “Some guys don’t even count them. They don’t even wake up at night.”

  “Good for them.”

  Pa chuckled and I knew we were off the subject of guilt, at least for the moment. “Get yourself some of that gin,” he said. “And bring me my cane liquor. There’s a joint on the counter by the stove.”

  “It’s okay you drinking?”

  “I don’t give a fuck.”

  The kitchen was small and dark because Pa hadn’t switched the battery on. I filled two tall glasses with ice, poured one full of gin and the other half full of cane liquor, topped it with tonic water and squeezed in a slice of lime.

  “One thing about dying,” Pa said as I handed him his drink – “Ah this looks lovely, thank you – one thing about dying is I live so deeply now, every moment counts.” He chuckled again, as if everything were becoming a joke. “Maybe time is elastic, and we all get the same, just stretched or contracted.” He flinched, hardened a moment. “Why don’t you light that joint –”

  I lit it and passed it to him. “How bad?”

  “Spasms are real bad. Like that one. Goes away.” He tensed again.

  “What are you doing for it?”

  “Besides the cane liquor and weed? Nothing. But I’m gonna have to.”

  I wanted to tell him I’d be here, for him, as long as he lived. But even that I couldn’t say. The cops wanted me in Maine, could use my absence to put me away. And Abigail was still missing.

  “There’s a whole bunch of painkillers,” he went on. “I don’t want none of them. Makes me remember those tons of opium we flew out of Nam and Laos, all headed for US markets, where of course we spent more billions trying to interdict them.”

  “Same in Afghanistan, half the guys we put in to run the place are tied to drugs.”

  “So you and me,” he looked at me curiously, “why were we protecting that?”

  The ancient unanswerable question. “We did the right thing in 2001,” I said. “Hitting the Taliban. But then Bush let everything slide, said we’re not doing any nation building when that’s exactly what the place was ripe for – we could have modernized that country, shut down the madrassas and got the women out of their goddamn burkhas – ”

  “Bush didn’t didn’t give a shit about Afghanistan. He wanted Iraq, all that oil. Wanted to pretend he was a man. And by letting Bin Laden go free at Tora Bora he cost hundreds of thousands of more lives, some of them ours.”

  “So as usual our talks boil down to the problem with being a warrior is you’re putting not only your life but your freedom and morals in somebody else’s hands.”

  “Yeah,” Pa said. “That’s the fuckin problem.”
r />   TROPICAL NIGHT had fallen. The coconut fronds were blackly outlined against the gleaming stars thick as milk.

  A cool wind was coming downriver, rustling the leaves. Farther up the valley a rooster was calling, another answered. The mynahs in the mango tree began to cease their chattering and chortling and settle into sleep. A Black Witch moth battered against the screen, red eyes glittering. Pa snickered. “A bit early for him to show up.”

  “It don’t mean shit, Pa.” Like I mentioned before, the Black Witch is a huge moth who visits when there will be a death in the family. But as Pa said, this wasn’t the season.

  When I looked around the comfortable cabin it seemed impossible that this place where Pa had lived so long would soon be empty, the rusty Datsun pickup without a driver, the chickens in a new home. We create an exoskeleton where we live, I realized, that slowly collapses when we die.

  “You know, Pa, I can’t stay –”

  “Stay? Of course not. Damn good you came.”

  “I have problems in Maine, a friend who’s missing and I’m afraid she’s dead.”

  “Listen, Sam, I ain’t going to stay around for my death either.”

  I laughed, loving him so much. “Where you planning to go?”

  “Gonna to sail one of my old canoes out to sea, with some food and booze. Go far as I can go.”

  “Jesus, Pa.”

  “Jesus my ass.”

  “I said that because it’s a lovely idea. But I’m scared of it.”

  “This guy in Martinique once, old friend of mine, French Intelligence. You never met him… For his eightieth birthday he windsurfed halfway down the island to a dinner his family’d organized, but part way there, out in the middle of the damn ocean, his mast breaks.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “So he’s sitting on his board in the high seas and it’s getting dark and there’s a great white circling that then bites off the back of his board. But somehow he manages to splint the mast and at midnight arrives at his party when everybody’s afraid he’s dead. When he come in they thought he was a ghost.”

  I tried to imagine splinting a windsurfer mast in high waves at night, a shark circling. “Unfucking believable.”

  “I’ve always wanted to just sail out to sea. And now I will.” He tossed off his drink. “So that means I have to leave before I get so weak I can’t go.”

  I refilled our drinks and brought out the egg rolls. “How’d you know,” Pa said. “Damn only thing I care for anymore is Chinese food.”

  “From the Jade Palace.”

  “In Waimea? Thanks.”

  “I always bring you this stuff, Pa.”

  “I know, I know. But thank you anyway.”

  He’d eaten one bite and put it down. “You ready for your chicken, Pa?”

  He looked at me gently. “In a while.”

  I ate mine slowly, hungry as I was. Thinking of how tough Pa had always been, always hungry for food and life, and the pain I felt for his loss was even worse than mine for losing him.

  Highway to Hell on my phone. “Sorry, Pa.” I reached to shut it off and saw the number. “It’s Lexie.”

  “You tell her hi for me –”

  “Hey it’s not even six a.m. where you are,” I says to her. “What’s up?”

  “Yeah yeah so what.” Her voice rough, as if she’d been smoking. “The cops have been around. Keep asking where you are. Just called again.”

  “What you tell them?”

  “You have some new girlfriend somewhere, I don’t know where and I don’t give a damn.”

  “They ain’t been calling my phone.”

  “They’re probably tracking you?”

  “I disabled that.”

  “How’s your Dad?”

  “They say why they want me?”

  “Not a word. He ain’t good, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry, Honey. So sorry. But you better tell your Dad goodbye and get your ass back here.”

  “Not this soon, Lexie. I can’t…”

  “They’re going to put out an all-points on you. You’ll get grabbed at HNL and sent back here in chains.”

  Upriver

  PA WATCHED me reflectively. “You gonna tell me, this Maine thing?”

  I explained best I could, how wanting to help Bucky I’d tracked down Abigail, the widow of the man he’d supposedly killed. But then when she went missing all the attention turned on me. So I was not only terrified for her but also the major suspect in her disappearance.

  “It’s after midnight,” Pa said. “But tomorrow you can take a night flight to the mainland then another to Portland – get you there, what are we Monday – get you there Wednesday afternoon.”

  My spirit railed against this. I didn’t want to leave my dying father. Going to sail out to sea, he said. I wanted to be there, on the beach, watching till he disappeared over the horizon. I wanted to go with him.

  I did not want him to die alone. I did not want him to die.

  “Funny thing is,” he said, “I’m going to be dead long before you get this sorted out, so I’ll never know what happens. Christ if you end up back in jail again…”

  “I won’t, Pa, don’t worry.” I was lying, just to say this.

  “That last time, Halawa Prison.”

  “You never missed a visit. You kept me sane.” This choked me up. “Even in Leavenworth, you came much as you could…”

  “That fuckin motel there they never turn on the heat. And food? Kansas has the only eggs in the world even the yolks are white.”

  Upriver a pueo hooted, echoing off the cliffs. The sacred owl of Hawaii, soon to be extinct. The divine protector of the human spirit. I shivered; no matter how hard I tried to fight, everything seemed doomed.

  Pa had hardly touched his food. “Even the weed,” I said, “don’t make you hungry?”

  “Those days are gone…” He snickered. “They were fun, though.”

  I put the leftovers in the reefer and rolled another joint. We sat on the porch hearing the frogs, the wind in the palms, the distant rumble of the ocean and all the other night sounds of the Hawaiian jungle, watching the vast progression of the stars across the night, till a scimitar moon rose above the cliffs and glowed into the room.

  “I wish I could figure out how to help you,” Pa said.

  “I’m fine.” Again I feared the lie would turn against me.

  “If I was you, you got two choices: one, disappear –”

  “That won’t work –”

  “Shut up. Listen. Have Smyrna make you a new life so you got it you need it.”

  Smyrna was my cousin Sally’s longtime lover who had been in the Agency as a disguise technician. Last year she’d made me a false face that saved my life. “I don’t need one. I’m good.”

  “Or the other choice is more difficult – if this girl comes back dead.”

  “Please, I’ve been through that a thousand times…”

  “Somehow you gotta prove your innocence, that you went back there because your friend, this Bucky guy –”

  “He ain’t my friend.”

  “– whatever you call him then, because he was falsely arrested and that means the real killer’s out there still. And this poor girl –”

  “Abigail.”

  “God knows where she ends up in this mess.”

  “God knows.”

  “Well if there is an afterlife I’ll be there watching over you. I’ll do what I can.”

  “I know that.”

  “Trouble is,” he snickered, “I don’t think there is one.”

  “It’s so evil, death. Imagine, we live and learn and grow and then it ends. Pointless. Death is a crime. Death is murder.”

  “Point is have as much fun as you can. Along the way. The Devil hates fun. Our happiness drives him crazy.”

  I thought about this. “So when anyone tries to preach against having fun, you know who they’re working for.”

  “Even if they don’t.”

&nb
sp; I laughed. “The road to Hell is paved with good deceptions?”

  “You said it,” he coughed. “I didn’t.”

  “Fuck it, Pa, I got to leave in the morning and I could sit here on this porch with you for weeks, months, just talking – who’s got the right to take that away?”

  “Son, son, you’re getting too worked up. It’ll get in the way of your saving yourself. Like in a firefight, focus on who’s shooting at you and from where, and take them out.”

  “Depends how much ammo you have.”

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  This gave me a good belly laugh. “You’re absolutely right.”

  He put his cold hand on mine. “And that, my son, is why you’re going to win.”

  HIGHWAY TO HELL again. Again I go to switch it off but it’s Mitchell.

  “I’ll call you back,” I says. “Tomorrow.”

  “Where the fuck are you?”

  “With Pa. I’ll call you –”

  “Did you know every Maine Legislator can take up to a million a year under the table, and doesn’t have to declare it to the Legislature, just to the IRS, which keeps it secret? You know this?”

  “No.”

  “These pro-wind Legislators, they’ve been taking so much wind money they could buy the New York Yankees.”

  “Okay, okay… I’m heading back to Maine tomorrow. I’ll call you on the way to Kona.”

  “I’m chasing them down. Seeing what they do with their payoffs.”

  “Some payoffs aren’t in cash, Mitchell.”

  “There’s always money underneath. Root of all evil.”

  “THAT WAS MITCHELL,” I say to Pa.

  “Even though I never met him I feel I know him.”

  “It’s like his entire life now is protecting others. So they can have what he can’t.”

  “A good life.”

  “To have a good life, he says, you gotta do as much good as you can.”

  Pa shifted uncomfortably. “Let’s have another hit and one more drink. There’s a story I got to tell you.”

  It began to rain, tinkling on the tin roof and pattering through the palms. A softness to the air, a redolence of jungle and earth. I got the drinks and rolled another one and sat back down. “You ain’t gonna eat anything, Pa?”