Keola wound up on his back, Malia straddling him, rising and falling above him and around him, beautiful and flushed as she rode his cock. Saul, behind her, guided her hips and set the rhythm, letting her fall back against him to catch her breath. He touched Keola and Malia where they met, sliding his fingers up and down through Malia’s sweet wetness, faster and faster until she let out a harsh strangled moan and Keola called out to stop stop stop before he came right there up inside her. Then Keola pulled Saul down, licked his fingers in a frenzy and told him it was his turn now.
By the end of the night, Saul knew how it felt to be the center of their affection, in more ways than one, and it was good enough to hope he’d die before morning and be frozen in the moment forever in heaven.
The next morning brought no awkward silence. There were no lightning bolts hurled down on them by an angry god. The world didn’t seem to care, so they ate breakfast, and Keola went to the woodworking shop, and Saul went to the boat repair shop, and Malia went to gather cuttings and put paving stones down for the garden path, and the world still didn’t care, so they did the same thing again that night. This time it was Saul who got to bury himself in Malia, feel her body tighten around him, laughing in surprise and pleasure when Keola pushed into him from behind.
The days were easy, and the nights were filled with joy in seemingly infinite variety. Malia’s bags disappeared into a closet somewhere. Cot and hammock were put away, and the money Keola had been saving for Malia’s bed went to buying a big kingsize mattress they could all get tangled up in.
It wasn’t perfect. Even Keola, in all his wild expansiveness and absence of selfdoubt, was too wary to talk much about their future. But he’d talk about next month, and next year, and smile like he was thinking about a vision of their lives even further ahead. The first plan had been to fix up the house and sell it, but things were different now.
Things were different now, but Malia didn’t know if they were different enough. She felt comfortable and safe and even loved, Saul and Keola doting on her, but how could this all last, really? Her life had never been stable or dependable, and she couldn’t imagine that an arrangement as unorthodox as this would break the pattern. The positive pregnancy test only increased her insecurity. She’d always wanted to be a mother, just not like this, not now, without even knowing who the father was.
She didn’t mind during the hours of the day spent working or cooking or swimming down by the rocky shoreline while Saul and Keola dived deep to spear for lobsters and the little waterfall’s half rainbow floated above them. She didn’t mind at night in their bed, certainly. But when she was alone in the house, the worry began to rise up into terror.
It was at one of those times that Jonathan called. He’d finally found her. And he was hurting. He’d just tried to kill himself. He was sorry from the bottom of his heart, and he had to speak to her one last time before he turned the knife on himself again. She left without packing, because she’d be back soon, after all. She just had to iron things out with Jonathan, make sure he was safe. Maybe they would work better as friends than as lovers. Taking the high road, that was what it was.
Keola came home first, saw the note, and nearly fell apart. He found Jonathan’s house and spent the night parked in front of it, a baseball bat in the seat next to him in case any calls for help sounded. And the next night. And the next.
Saul was sick with worry for the both of them, and it got to the point that he walked all the way to Jonathan’s house to retrieve Keola. He collapsed into the front seat of Keola’s car, knocking the baseball bat to the floor, and leaned across the center console to throw his arms around Keola’s shoulders. Come home. Stop this. You can’t choose for her, you can’t fix this with violence, you can’t save her, she has to save herself. It made him sick to say those things, to give up on her so easily even though he knew logically he was right, but he couldn’t stand another night alone, not after the sweet rare few when he’d been the least lonely man in the universe.
She’d been gone several weeks when Jonathan showed up at the house. He walked up the driveway lined with her ti plants, his arms lifted to his sides, showing empty palms. Malia had made a decision, he said, but perhaps it was best to talk about the matter on neutral ground.
Maybe he’d waited to find Keola alone, because Saul, who’d seen the worst that men like Jonathan could do, would never have let Keola go down to the ocean. Would never have let him get into the boat. Saul didn’t even realize what had happened until he saw it on the evening news. There was nothing official in place, nothing legitimizing their relationship, to ensure he was told before that.
The four-day search for a man lost in an unfortunate fishing accident was called off today. Jonathan’s face with the microphone at his chin, describing the freak wave that had pulled Keola from the boat and washed him away. He was his friend, he said. It was terrible, so terrible, because Keola was supposed to be Jonathan’s best man at his wedding that fall, and now he was gone, and there wasn’t even a body to bring back to his family. They’d searched with the rescue helicopter, dozens of divers, but unless new developments arose, search efforts were to be discontinued. The missing man, Keola Luahiwa…
Saul should have gone to the police, but he didn’t. His grandfather, his father…they hadn’t been good men. But they’d been powerful men. Jonathan had a hold on Malia like dark magic, his words like a spell; Saul could call on his heritage, his mana, call up the old chants again, half remembered but still charged, and fight fire with fire. Free her. Avenge Keola. He was done being timid. He was done being good. He would pour himself into this purpose and live for nothing else.
Saul began to wander. He couldn’t hold a job anymore. The payments on the house lapsed, and the bank stepped in. The ti plants became overgrown and halfwilted, the whole property turning wild again. Saul didn’t care. He half hoped Mauna Kea would run red, set the house on fire, and send it crashing over the cliff. He walked away without looking behind him, not even once.
When her son (their son? Keola’s son?) was born, though, the numbness that kept him alive and afloat turned to stabbing, searing pain, like being operated on awake. Kalani. Their boy, who should have been raised in their warm, loving home, the wonderful sanctuary they’d built together bit by bit… The son of a monster instead.
He found the words for the curse. He spoke them. His akualele found Jonathan and drove him away, but he took Malia and Keola with him, all the way to Oahu. Saul followed, the curse trailing along in his shadow.
A year later, Malia died.
* * * *
Ori opened his eyes. The pool of his blood had grown thick at the edges. How many more pints did he have left to lose? How much longer did he have to wait? Enough of the past. Kalani. I’m—
Chapter Ten
2002 Ori wrapped a towel around Julie’s shivering shoulders. She kicked at the sand, clearly agonized that she couldn’t seem to stop crying. “He dropped in on my wave. And then…and then… They were calling me names, telling me to go away—”
“Fuck this,” said her friend Gina. “I’ll go fetch Lenny.” She wheeled around and raced down the beach. Kalani called after her, but she ignored him in her fury.
“They’re gonna get their haole heads pounded,” said Kalani, “unless they run.” Ori knew it was true. Lenny Kaialiilii liked to hang out with his cousins on the next beach over, but at seven feet tall and pushing three hundred pounds, he was much better at fighting than surfing. “We should talk to them. See if they’ll apologize to Julie.”
“Okay,” said Ori. He had deep reservations about confronting four beefy, older, potentially drunken Australian surfers. His pride was wounded, sure—the insult to Julie, the arrogant claim of foreigners on Hawaiian waves—but he would have waited on his own. Of course, since Kalani wanted to go reason with them, Ori would back him up all the way. “Let’s go fix them, brah.”
Kalani gave Julie a quick hug and set out toward the knot of bronzed, freckled Aussies
. Ori stayed right by his side. “Aloha!” said Kalani, a bright smile sounding in the word. Ori knew how blinding that smile could be. “This is a great little beach, and we’re happy to share it, but you just made a fourteen-year-old girl feel real bad.” The tallest, the one with blond dreadlocks, stalked forward. “I don’t know how long you been in Hawai’i, but maybe you got the wrong idea about the aloha spirit. We can all smooth this over, you say sorry and—” “Piss off, ya fucking black cunts.” Ori could see the head butt coming from a mile away. Because of some evil trick of
perception, by the time he’d cracked open his dry lips to scream a warning, Kalani was staggering backward, clutching his forehead. A principle from his lessons in striking: the knee is better than the fist against the stomach. Visualization became action as Ori trapped the man’s nape in both hands and pulled. Became force when he pivoted his body and drove his knee up into the man’s soft unprotected belly. When the man doubled over and wheezed at Ori’s strike, he earned a second one to the face. This blow wasn’t soft at all. It came with the sickening crunch of cartilage.
No elation, no fear, no surprise that either blow had landed. No time. Two more men came at him now. One, reeking of salt and sweat and yeasty malt liquor, crashed against him clumsily but Ori slipped under, shouldered upward, skittered away, kept striking.
Kalani wasn’t down, thank God; the fourth man grappled him, but Kalani had a heel set in the sand to hold his ground. Ori took another one of his two attackers down with a knee to the crotch and a kick-stomp only slightly higher. Never mind ring rules, not with these odds. The man’s howl of pain only made Ori feel colder, more detached. When the second man landed a sloppy-fast fist to the side of his head, Ori shook off the pain and threw himself into a grapple. He bent the man’s arm until he screamed. Flipped him onto his stomach—
“Let him go, Jackie Chan,” said Kalani, setting a hand on Ori’s shoulder. When Ori looked up from his cold-rage hyperfocus, he realized the other men had fled. The last one lay mouth-breathing and whining in the sand, twisting his arm uselessly against Ori’s grip. “The cavalry’s here. Let’s see if he can race Lenny back to his car, huh?”
“Sure,” said Ori. He let the last Australian scramble up. He limped off toward the parking lot, looking back over his shoulder at the oncoming mob of angry, hulking Hawaiians, Lenny at the lead. He and Kalani stayed behind, standing in a shallow pit of churned sand with the ocean sparking at Kalani’s back. “How’s your head?”
Kalani grinned breathlessly, knocking on the side of his own head with his knuckles. “This thick skull? It’ll take more than that to bring me down!”
A goose egg had started to form on one side of his forehead, round and red. Ori reached out and covered it with his palm. He stroked the undamaged skin just to the left of the injury with his thumb. Kalani’s eyelids lowered, his big grin softening into a quiet, trusting smile. Ori smiled back.
* * * *
2011 He woke up to a tugging sensation in his wrist. At first he thought it was the doctors, giving him stitches to close the wound there, but then he opened his eyes. A fishhook was caught in his open vein, pulling his skin up into an aching tent shape. He hissed, swallowing down gorge at the grotesque sight of it, and tried to brush it away, but it wouldn’t come undone. He accepted that and swallowed down the pain as well. Focus. This is not your body. There is no pain here. It's all in your head. It looks worse than it feels.
He was still in Saul’s car, but the pool of blood on the sidewalk was alive with little minnows. The car was blanketed by a knot of writhing vines that seemed to grow and twist even as Ori watched. They’d pulled Saul into their tangle and absorbed him until all Ori could see was his eyes.
Ori tumbled out of the car and staggered away, down the ghostworld street. The freakish fishline made of blood didn’t tug at him, but he wanted to leave; God how he wanted to leave, because if he looked behind him he’d see his body lying there, arm flung out and running red.
The warehouses and asphalt and streetlights of the real world still surrounded him, but they were faint, translucent, and had begun to soften at the corners like bread left out in the rain. The hulking cranes of the harbor skyline had gone half-organic, their metal claws forming pincer shapes and waving slowly in arthropod distress.
He followed the fishline through the softening, empty streets of phantom Honolulu.
No confusion, no horror, no fear. He held the line to Kalani, and whether he was the fisherman or the fish at the end of that line… Well, it didn’t matter. Focus. Don’t look aside to where the world’s edges crumble into nightmare. Focus, follow, follow.
The pain in his wrist soon faded to a dull ache. As long as he didn’t look down, it wasn’t too bad. The line drifted forward, not subject to gravity, and thinned to a gossamer pinkness where it vanished into the horizon, leading him inland toward the lush green volcanic mountains of the Ko’olau Range.
His footsteps fell like feathers. The cityscape scrolled by at a tremendous speed, as if an airport walkway carried him along.
The Pali Highway into the mountains—that was his route, he realized at last. Perhaps Kalani had gone back to Nanakuli, then onward to the tip of Ka’ena Point, where the souls of the dead were said to leap into the afterlife. Ori knew the local legends, at least, and wished he’d learned more, now that both their lives depended on it.
But the Pali Highway stretched northeast, and Ka’ena was far to the northwest.
He looked above him. There was no symmetry to the blazing, shifting thing in the sky that should have been the sun; it (or was it a she or a he?) sent out shining darts that flew like hummingbirds over the shifting land. Compasses and highway maps wouldn’t work here, Ori knew then. Kalani might be hopelessly lost on his search for Ka’ena Point, lost and in danger, and the thought was a thousand times more painful than the wound at his wrist.
He followed faster.
The mountains weren’t even real mountains. They were the water-worn remnants of one single giant volcano that in an earlier age had blown itself apart and fallen into the ocean. When he’d learned the history of the Ko’olau Range in school, the awe and terror had knocked the breath right out of him, that such violence could be hidden in plain sight. The mountains wove into one another, clinging to their common heritage and flowing downward in graceful, near-vertical ridges all overgrown with green. He imagined that green cover as a huge draping curtain with deeply shadowed folds, concealing darker, stranger secrets.
The line was thin now, but still a vivid red. It left the highway and ran upward into one of the dim little valleys. A chorus swelled in the air as he followed: bird cries, the rustling of leaves, the faintest singing. Where were the spirits of this place?
Ori didn’t have to wait long. The figure of a man stood by a rocky outcropping underneath the dense shadow of a breadfruit tree. A man, at least, not some terrifying monster like he’d expected, perhaps with the head of a marine creature and bristling with teeth.
“Aloha,” said Ori, surprised that his voice even sounded at all in the air of this world. “I’m looking for my friend, Kalani.” He bobbed his head as if he were Japanese, not knowing the right form of respect to take. “Can you tell me if you’ve seen him, please?”
The man stepped forward into the pale, indistinct light of the valley. He wore a simple black and white malo, and a breezy smile on his face. The smile was so incongruous to their heightened reality that Ori could almost believe he was a modern man coming from a traditional dance performance, like he was just about to open his mouth and talk about something utterly mundane like the price of gas.
That was until he did open his mouth, and a cascade of wriggling white maggots tumbled out over his lower lip and fell to his feet, a few stragglers sticking randomly to his chest and belly. The sweet smell of rot—way worse than fish guts left out in the hot sun, a thousand times worse—overtook all his senses. Made his stomach churn and his eyes water. A clammy sweat prickled his skin, no part
of him undisturbed, as if his body writhed on the verge of turning itself inside out
And the maggot man wasn’t alone. Pale, emaciated figures—humanoid, not human, Ori wouldn’t make that mistake again—rose up out of the shadows. They threw themselves at the maggot man’s feet in a frenzy. Fighting and clawing up fistfuls of the maggots. Stuffing them into greedy, gaping mouths.
Ori took two or three stumbling steps back, sickened but too afraid to look away. More of the hungry creatures swarmed, all their soft parts shriveled to leather but still recognizably men, women, and the worst, children. Their dull eyes swung toward him, and the panic mounted.
“Food for the god,” said the maggot man and unrolled an obscenely long tongue speckled with maggots like fat grains of rice. What finally broke Ori’s paralysis wasn’t the tongue but the raised hand crackling with streaks of blue fire, charging, and if Ori didn’t run like hell, he’d be cooked alive with balefire, ripped apart and eaten, because the things scrabbling at the ground didn’t have sharp teeth, but they were hungry, so hungry…
He twisted around and ran for the highway. The air cracked like glass and the ground shook and a streak of fire sizzled past his shoulder and licked a palm tree into earthly red flames. I’m going to die here. Here, and there, back in the car, in the world I never should have left. He veered to avoid a sheer cliff face—wasn’t he supposed to be running away from the mountains?—and pounded down a slope, the rich wet soil dragging at his feet.
Belleau, Heidi & Vane, Violetta_Hawaiian Gothic Page 11
