by Pat Connid
One look at my new friend and it was clear he knew all about digestion. Even so, I couldn’t slow down—with the combination of a near lava bath, then an actual saltwater bath, I was dry as a dead man’s whisper.
Allejo hadn’t asked too many questions, and I appreciated that. Surely, he was still assessing the strange man who’d come to his door but decided that in my condition—or in any condition—I posed no serious threat. He was kind, welcoming and hospitable.
Working for the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, he had come out to this station earlier in the day to pick up some audit trails from the vast array of equipment in the hut. Allejo explained to me—if nothing but to fill the void of silence as I sucked down water—that despite the garden of antennas on the roof, the microwave transmitter between this satellite observation station and the main hub had stopped working a few weeks earlier. He rattled on for a few minutes about craters and vents, but all I wanted was to sleep.
Inquiring about the nearest motel or convenience store within walking distance pulled a smile out of the big man.
“You could walk there but with the air quality and the heat… well, you’d probably get eaten by buzzards.”
“You have buzzards in Hawaii?”
“Maybe,” Allejo said. “But, I think if you see a buzzard, maybe you’re in the sort of condition that you’d never be able to tell anyone about it.”
“Good point.”
He looked to the door, then around the room. If I were a thief, the electronic equipment in the room would probably pick me up several grand. Of course, I didn't have any means to haul anything away…
Of course, this was not my plan, but I felt as he looked at the ragged, desperate stranger, these were the thoughts going through his mind.
“I’m not sure you can stay in this place, here,” he said, eyes not meeting mine.
“You know, Allejo, you haven’t asked me how some crazy bastard like me got all the way out here.”
He shrugged, his eyes went off somewhere, leaving me behind, and then another grin pulled to his lips.
“You opened the door, let me inside and gave me your water,” I said. I tried to catch his eye, but he seemed to be looking at someone in the room who wasn’t there. “But that's it, huh? Not the curious type, then.”
“Questions are only words looking for more words,” he said, blinked, and was back with me. “Words can be deceptive, Dexter.”
“Not true, my round friend,” I said, drawing a laugh from him. “Words are pure and perfect. It’s just the person who uses them that can be deceptive.”
He placed a large paw on my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “See? That’s what I'm saying,” he said and nodded toward the door. “I know everything I need to know about you now. So, I have no questions for you.”
“Good,” I said, following him out the door. “I have plenty of my own already that I don’t have answers to.”
Allejo drove a cherry red Jeep Wrangler. A man of his size, easily three hundred pounds, I would have expected maybe a truck, a van… school bus.
He pressed his body into the driver’s seat and, surprisingly, slipped in much easier than I would have expected. It was as if he’d broken in the vehicle like a favorite pair of tennis shoes.
We drove across the dirt heading toward the flat horizon. Slowly, the flat line ahead of us began to bubble then eventually grew into a scrubby, ragged line.
Soon, I could just make out a wide cluster of trees.
Allejo explained that the part of the lava flow we were driving on had been formed in the early eighties. The stucco hut had sensors in the air, in the ground, and even in the water below.
“The sensors in the water have been blinky for a long while, though.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, the only way down is a rope ladder but one look at it and no one with more than half a brain would trust his life on that thing.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. "Or at least half of it."
I wondered if Allejo had thought I was some gangbanger or drug fiend the first time he’d seen me; someone out to rip him or the hut off. Now, convinced I was harmless (or a brain damaged idiot), he smiled happily to himself and hummed along to a rock radio station
“You not a big Don Ho fan, Allejo?”
“You know,” he nodded his huge head along with the aggressive music. “With the impolite, crude nature of people these days, I suppose Mr. Ho’s name is the subject of some jokes; for some reason that just came to mind as you said it like that.” His head bobbing slowed some. “I hadn’t really thought of it before.”
I winced. “I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful. Seriously, I—“
“Nah, you’re cool. It seems like you’re a bit of a jokester guy, though. A funny guy. So, it sounded a bit like the beginning of a joke coming out of your mouth,” he smiled. “Jokes are good.”
“They’ve gotten me this far. Even saved my ass a couple times.”
"I've seen your ass," he said. "You should maybe cut back on the jokes."
"Okay, who's the funny guy now?" I said and laughed myself into a coughing fit.
"You've got a kind of a big butt."
"Yeah, yeah. I got it."
"All I'm saying," he said and we laughed together, eventually both falling into a comfortable, pleasant silence.
Twenty minutes later, when we finally got to a road lined with tall palms on one side, he sped up heading toward town. I asked if he could recommend any place to stay.
“I know just the place for a guy like you.”
“A guy like me?” I leaned against the door of his jeep and eyeballed him as I chewed away a piece of flayed skin from my hand. “And what kind of guy is that?”
He hummed for a moment more, then: “A guy who falls from the sky.” This tickled him, and he laughed at his own joke. He seemed to like his jokes (Respectfully, I refrained from turning the ass joke back on him).
I wondered if he’d seen me parachute in. But, if he had, he likely wouldn’t have been so startled at my sudden visit.
The jeep bumped along a little faster, the road getting progressively better as the sun finally fell below the horizon. I could see a few lights wink on ahead of us, in the distance.
Rolling down the window further, the night air was refreshing—tasting a little like vegetation. But it wasn’t unpleasant. As if each breath was a small sip of life.
We took a turn sharper than seemed safe and then the big man spun the wheel, using only an index finger, righting the jeep again.
“The rains, when they come, sometimes keep coming,” he said as an apology. “It messes all the roads up. Sometimes they disappear altogether. But—” He tapped me on the shoulder with an open palm. “There is always a road. Sometimes you just have to look harder for it.”
Allejo was a cross between Don Ho, Andre the Giant and the guy from Kung Fu. I liked him.
The packed dirt road soon became asphalt, which then led us to the back of a sleepy subdivision. After a couple streets, our turns came quicker.
When we finally arrived, he’d pulled to a stop in front of a large, two-story white house. The rusting iron gate was choked with vines, and every window was a black hole. Allejo, he didn’t even look at it.
“My uncle’s place. You can stay here for the night.”
“What about your uncle.”
“He’s dead.”
I blinked. “He’s not still in there, right?”
“Better not be,” Allejo said with a broad smile. “When he passed, he left it to me. If he’s in there now, he owes me rent.”
"Perfectly reasonable."
“I’ve got a place farther in town. I have to get the data sheets to Polly, my supervisor. Then, I’m going to crash at my place. My girlfriend can’t fall asleep if I’m not there.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s kinda nice,” he said and he seemed to mean it. I admit, that hadn’t been my first thought.
As I got out, h
e reached into the glove compartment and tossed me a key. I walked around the front of the jeep and came to his door.
“I’ve got to make some calls.”
“Phone works fine. I keep up the bills.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But they’re kinda long distance.” He nodded at this. “I’ll reimburse you, I promise.”
Allejo shook his head. “Nah, you don’t look like the kinda guy who gets real chatty on the phone. Don’t worry about it. I've got Internet phone anyhow. VOIP. Real cheap.”
I nodded and, for reason not immediately apparent, and for the first time in a very long time, there was an unfamiliar emotion filling my chest, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
Allejo turned his massive head my direction and stared at me with his deep, brown eyes.
“Take whatever time you need, just don’t take it all. And clean up after yourself for the next person."
"Oh? Okay. When are they coming?"
He shrugged.
"I don't know yet." He put the jeep in gear, smiled and pulled away. I watched him as he drove away, slowly bouncing down the road.
THE FIRST CALL I'D made was to Pavan but his sister said that he was working. Duh. Should’ve known that.
I would need some cash if I was going to make it more than a day in Hawaii. It sort of hit me then—I was in Hawaii.
How the hell had that happened?
My late night Golden Bear—I had to come up with a name for the guy—had tagged me with the golf club but, obviously, I’d been sedated long enough to get all the way out to the Aloha state, however long that took.
And what did I know about Hawaii? The sole knowledge I had of it came from a two-part episode of the Brady Bunch. So, the only thing in my intellectual arsenal? Don’t pick up any wooden tikis off the beach.
I wanted to call Laura but couldn’t remember the number because it was written down next to the bar phone in Wicked Lester's. Never bothered to remember it.
Still had to talk to Pavan, so I tried the theater.
After sitting on hold, listening to the show times, Pavan finally came on the line.
“Dude, where the hell have you been?”
“If I gave you forty-nine guesses, you’d get every one of them wrong.”
“Man… you just up and left.”
Allejo’s uncle had this ancient Barcalounger and, the moment my backside had been introduced to it, I’d decided that I wanted to be buried in this chair. Not anytime soon, mind you, but eventually.
“That’s what you think? That I just… left?”
He said his voice dropped low: “No. Got the feeling you-know-who paid another visit.”
“Yep. How long have I been gone?”
“What? Um, two days,” he said and lowered his voice more. “Do I want to know what happened?”
Two days?
I said, “Not without a cold beer in your hand.”
“Just finished one,” Pavan said. “You gotta talk to somebody about this guy. I've got a cousin who knows some guys, you know?"
"Maybe. Yeah, maybe."
"What’s he after, did he say?”
“Same as before. He gives me some random-sounding bits of information and, bam, I’m out and wake up and those bits are relevant to me not dying somehow.”
“Fuck, that's the craziest shit I ever heard, Dexter. Did he say why?”
“Nah,” I said, fading toward sleep. “But each time he says ‘lesson begins’ like it’s some sort of—”
“Like he’s some sort of creepy teacher or something. I had a guy like that."
"I don't think you did."
"No, this dude I had, he was a history teacher and a gym teacher, but he'd always wear his gym stuff to class."
"Pavan…"
"He had these little, tiny shorts and you could see--"
"Pavan, okay, enough!" I said, took a deep breath and let it out again. "He’s a strong dude. Like military or ex-military maybe. Maybe he's trying to get me in shape, straighten me out. Or dead.”
"If Chuck Norris was one of those Big Brother Big Sisters people, he would be this guy. Like some crazy motherfucking mentor dude, then.”
“I have no idea.”
Pavan spoke away from the phone for a minute, he had to go. “Your mentor guy is going to get you dead if you don’t watch out, man.”
I said, “I’ll have some time to work it out on the way back. Long road ahead of me.”
“Back? Where the hell are you?”
I pulled in another deep breath and my head spun a little. Pushing it back out through my teeth, I said, “Man, I’m in Hawaii.”
There was silence for a moment or two. Then:
“Dude, no way.”
“Yep.”
“That’s awesome.”
“Not so much.”
“You coming home?”
“Soon as I can. I need your help getting some funds outta by bank. I don’t have a lot in the account, but I hope I got enough to get back.”
“Okay, but before you leave man, I seen this on the Discovery Channel, you’ve got to go see the volcanoes.”
In the dark, starving but too tired to even look in the man’s fridge, I hung the phone up on Pavan and fell asleep in the most comfortable chair on the entire planet.
Chapter Seven
When I woke up, my neck and back felt like they were locked in a rock, paper, scissors battle to see which would get to complain loudest that I’d slept semi-upright in the chair.
Nearby, the sun whipped up small convection currents that twisted up fat ropes of dust and air, which slithered in and out of the living room window’s Venetian blinds
Everything hurt. Body-wide muscle aches to first degree burns on my thighs to red raw hands that were stinging because I hadn't washed the dirt and blood off the night before.
I moved only my head, craning my neck as far as it would go in each direction. It was a guess and not meant to be disparaging, but my surroundings looked like they came straight out of the seventies. Burnt orange shag carpet, cherry wood furniture. The lamp next to my Barcoheaven chair was a bulb surrounded by a shade made up of individual strings of amber-colored crystals. Jane Fonda wore a skirt like that in a movie one time, maybe.
Not wanting to take on the full force of the sun just yet, I clicked the lamp and the colored glass made the room glow warm and soft.
No TV-- just like home. For some reason that did not surprise me.
When I was a kid my mother had a friend, Carol, who’d either never married or divorced young. I remember her being sorta hip: short hair with bangs, like a blond Pat Benatar.
In her den, she’d had a decades-old stereo stack: radio receiver, amp, record player, dual cassette, 8-track player.
I remember digging through her music and, at the time, I would have been maybe six. There was a group, two men and two women, and the word ABBA was written in sparkly diamonds. Every time we went over, she and my mother would drink cold white wine from a box they’d put on the table between them, and I’d go in the den and listen to Abba.
Ten years later, when Carol decided to pick up and move to the west coast to open an art supplies store, she called and said I could have her stereo if I were willing to haul it away.
I was nearly seventeen and electronics, even old stuff, were cool (“vintage, not old” I would tell my friends) and jumped at the chance to pick up the rack. I would have paid her fifty bucks for the gear, but she told me to keep my money. Then she slept with me, my first time. Well, my first, second and third time. All in about seventy-five minutes.
I still love Abba.
Allejo’s dead uncle had a similar system to the one I’d happily traded my virginity for, and it looked like it had stood the test of time. As the radio receiver came alight it suddenly seemed intrusive to change the station, so I left it. The station's selection of music casually wandered from fifties to seventies to sixties and was surprisingly pleasant.
Wandering the house like a five-year-ol
d drunk, the muscles in my legs and arms began to loosen slightly. There wasn’t a spot on my body that wasn’t registering some sort of complaint, so an Aspirin breakfast was in my immediate future.
I was going to try to make it around without the lights but, with most of the shades down and curtains drawn, the whole house was pretty dark. Flipping the switch in the kitchen, there was a note taped to the lamp.
“Picked you up some milk for breakfast because the fridge is pretty bare,” it read. “There’s cereal in the cupboard but that’s it. My guests don’t usually stay beyond breakfast.”
I guessed that at one time Allejo had used this place as a bit of a love nest, taking girls back here after dinner, maybe. Even though I was sure he’d let me stay as long as I needed, I couldn’t help but feel my guest’s don’t usually stay beyond breakfast was a bit of a hint. It probably wasn’t, but this guest wasn’t going to stick around much longer than that either.
It struck me that the big man had been able to get into this house and out again without me waking up.
Maybe I sleep a little too deep for my own good. Reflecting upon the events of the past week, it seemed like a good idea to investigate how someone goes about sleeping with one eye open. Or invest in better locks.
It'd been two days since I’d left Atlanta. Two.
Had it all been transport time, or did my psycho "mentor" (as Pavan had dubbed him) take me somewhere else, too? Two days seems too long for just a flight to the Big Island.
In the bathroom, I stripped naked and looked in the mirror hanging on the back of the door.
Blisters pocked my calves and the redness spread halfway up my thighs, but it certainly could have been a lot worse. It felt a lot worse at that moment.
Years ago, I played sports like most of my friends. More recently, my sole athletic challenge was climbing the stairs to my apartment.
I gripped my hairy stomach with both hands.
“Spongy,” I said to my man in the mirror, and he frowned, disapproving. Then I put a hand on either side of my belly button, squeezed together, and made a hairy baby butt out of it. Laura never finds it funny— actually she says it makes her a bit nauseous. Pavan thinks it’s a scream. At the moment, feeling pretty low, I’m siding with Laura.
