Louie slipped the canteen off and took a sip to wet his caked lips. He handed it to me. “We think of something when we got to.”
“All in the way you look at it.”
Louie grinned. “You catching on, haole.”
I drank a small amount and handed the canteen back. Louie shook it. “Going down fast.”
“It does that when you drink it.”
“You funny, for somebody going die of sunstroke.”
I grunted.
We inched across the last few yards of ice-pick rock to the smooth pahoehoe and sat. I peeled the rags off my bloody feet. “Man, that stings.”
Louie winced, his feet looking worse than mine.
The sun boiled down.
We rested, gazing at the desolation that surrounded us. Even the ocean looked desolate, because it couldn’t help us.
“Let’s go,” Louie said. “Sit too long, we going get stiff.”
“Stiff already.”
“See?”
We staggered on.
“Hey, Louie,” I said. “Did you hear those dogs last night? Before the earthquake?”
“No.”
“They were howling, just like the night before.”
He kept walking, then stopped and looked back. “They knew it was coming.”
“You think so?”
“They were trying to warn us.”
Could be, I thought. They’d howled from down the coast, and Masa said they didn’t howl for nothing, and we’d gone that way and found Sam and Mr. Bellows. I was becoming a believer. Spirits, ghosts, howling dogs. The strange coincidence of Fred showing up and staying with Sam and Mr. Bellows until they were rescued.
It was creepy.
Or maybe it wasn’t. All in the way you look at it, like Louie said. “Hey, you think that small white dog was Pele?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“How come?”
“Because if I say it wasn’t, then she going get mad and make my life miserable.”
“Didn’t she just do that?”
Louie snorted and kept walking.
We came upon a new flow, smooth, molten mud rock that had folded over itself, then dried and hardened.
We started out.
“Aiy!” Louie yelped, one foot breaking through the thin rock skin, then the other. He sat, then sank.
Vanished.
“Louie!”
He groaned.
I scrambled up and peeked over the edge of the hole. It was dark. I could only see the top of his head. I got down flat on the lava, hanging over the edge. “Louie! Are you okay?”
He’d fallen into a tunnel, or a tube, where air had been trapped when the hot lava dried.
“Pull me up.”
I reached down and grasped his hand. He was wedged in and had to wiggle his way out. I pulled him up. Blood oozed from a cut on his shin. “We need a stick so we can bang the rocks in front of us.”
“Maybe we’re not following the ahus.”
“What ahus?” he said. “Look…no more.”
He was right. Not one marker. We’d lost the path.
“Rest,” Louie said, looking for a solid place to sit.
I stayed where I was, afraid to move and break the crust. I wasn’t ready to visit the center of the earth.
The lonely coast wobbled in haze. Not one cloud sat in the endlessly blue sky. “It’s too far, Louie.”
He looked ahead, then back the way we’d come. “You think we halfway yet? Supposed to be eleven miles.”
“Hard to tell.”
We sat sizzling, bacon in a frying pan, our faces growing puffy from the heat. We were going to feel it in spades tomorrow. If there was a tomorrow.
I stretched my legs and massaged my calves. They were starting to tighten up. “Come on, we got to keep going.”
He didn’t move.
I shrugged. Who cared anymore? It was over. We had a thousand miles of broken glass to walk over on cut and bloody feet. We were done for.
I sat. In that heat it took everything I had left just to breathe. “We got two choices, Louie—get up and move on, or fry to death. Which one you like?”
He took a long time answering. “You think we going know it when we die? Or we just going fall asleep?”
I was still thinking about that when I heard the engine.
“Chopper!” Louie shouted, struggling to his feet.
We got up and hobbled over the slight rise of the bowl we were in. Nothing in the sky.
But the sound was getting louder.
“There!” Louie said, jumping, waving his hands high above his head.
Skimming low along the coastline, a United States Coast Guard helicopter thumped toward us, the pulse of its rotors pounding the air. Whup-whup-whup-whup!
We leaped and waved and screamed, probably looking like fleas from the air. They could fly right over us and never know it.
“Here! Over here!”
“This way! Hey!”
They flew past. My heart pounded. “Come back!” My throat swelled with fire. Rescue passing us by was too much to take. “Wait…”
Louie jogged after them but soon gave up and stood watching them fade.
But the helicopter tilted and swooped in over the lava. “They saw us! Look, they saw us!”
The copter swung around and came back. For a moment it hovered over us, the pilot gazing down, talking into the mike on his helmet. I raised my arms, the wind from the rotors whipping up tiny bits of rock that stung my eyes.
Relief tumbled over me, a waterfall of everlasting love for the United States Coast Guard.
Whup-whup-whup-whup!
The sound was monstrous. I clamped my hands over my ears. The red and white colors of the coast guard never looked so good to me in all my life. The pilot hovered, searching for a place flat enough to land. The copter was huge, the size of two monster bulldozers. Red nose, white body, red tail. Three guys peered out the open side door.
I shielded my eyes as they crossed the blazing sun and came down smooth and settled on a patch of uneven rock.
We limped toward it, ducking into the wind of the rotors. A guy in an orange flight suit jumped out and jogged toward us. I nearly choked when I saw Dad in the doorway behind him. Never had that barrel chest and sea captain’s scowl looked so good to me. He shouted and waved, but I couldn’t hear over the roar of the rotors.
“Dad!” I yelled, overwhelmed to see him.
The man on the ground wore a helmet with a microphone in it so he could talk with the pilot. It said Ramos on his flight suit. “You boys from the Scout group at Halape?” he shouted.
“Yes! We need help!”
“That’s why we’re here!” He motioned for us to hunch down.
Louie and I followed him to the helicopter. The blast from the rotors was fierce. Pieces of rock pricked my skin, like in a sandstorm.
Dad and another coast guard guy reached out to pull us up. “Thank God!” Dad shouted, hugging me close. He pushed me back and looked me over. “Are you all right?” he shouted.
“We need help! Mr. Bellows…” I gave up. It was too loud to talk.
Ramos motioned me toward a seat, shouting, “I’m going to strap you in!” Dad sat next to me. Louie settled across from us. Ramos buckled us in. “Ready, Cap,” he said into his microphone.
Dad put his arm around my shoulder and hugged me again. I winced and he let go. “Bruises!” I shouted.
Dad nodded, deep creases in his face.
I glanced at Louie. “This is my dad! Dad, this is Louie!”
Louie nodded, then turned away. For the first time I noticed the gash behind his ear, the blood caked in his hair. Cuts and bruises raked his arms, legs, and face. Did I look as bad as he did?
“Hang on!” Ramos said. “We’re going up!”
The engine roared.
I clutched the base of my seat as we rose, tipped, and sped toward Halape, the door on the starboard side wide open. Endless miles of black lava flew by below.
From this height you could see the thin trail we’d been following, a faint gray snake on an endless black landscape. Another world, another universe. And there below was the spot where we’d drifted off onto the thin-crusted rock. I could see the hole Louie had fallen into.
The air cooled quickly.
The other coast guard guy, whose tag read McCreedy, tossed me and Louie coast guard T-shirts that he dug out of a box. I pressed mine against my burned face, feeling the heaven of something soft, something not of rock and heat. I put it on. He gave us water.
We drank deeply.
My eyes welled with thankfulness.
“How’d you get on this helicopter?” I shouted at Dad.
“Friends in coast guard! Got home last night!”
“Mom all right?”
He nodded. “Epicenter off Halape!”
“There was a wave!”
Dad motioned for me to wait, pointed at his ears. “Later!”
“Mister!” Louie shouted to Dad. “How big was it!”
“Seven point two!”
Louie and I glanced at each other.
We rode on without talking.
Dad watched the island pass by. I felt numb. Louie kicked my foot and lifted his chin to the open door. The helicopter was out over the water and circling back, banking. Halape came into view and you could see our small group looking up at us. All around them, and over the whole of Halape, our gear was scattered like trash blown from a passing garbage truck. The small island offshore was mostly sunken, and the coconut grove grew up out of the ocean.
Louie looked back at me and shook his head.
I nudged Dad and pointed. “Some camped in those trees! I was in a shelter…. Gone now!”
We circled closer.
Dad studied the grove in the ocean, the crumbled shelters that had not been swallowed, the ragged survivors looking up at us like zombies. It was eerie the way they just stood there. Was something wrong?
Dad shook his head. “Unbelievable.”
Tears filled my eyes.
Louie saw, his face fractured by my cracked lens. He turned away, showing none of the emotion I felt rushing up out of me. I took off my glasses and swiped at my eyes with the bottom of my T-shirt.
We landed close to the water where the sloping land flattened out. Two paniolos were off with the three remaining horses, soothing them as the helicopter settled.
Masa started down to us. No one else moved.
The engine slowed, the rotors swishing. We jumped out and ducked our way uphill. Why did everyone look like standing corpses? Was someone dead?
Mr. Bellows lay in the dirt.
We ran up and knelt around him, Ramos and McCreedy with first-aid gear. They asked Casey to move aside and went to work. Ramos lifted Mr. Bellows’s closed eyelids and checked his pupils, then listened to his chest and glanced up at McCreedy. “Weak.”
“We thought we were losing him,” Masa said.
“We did all we could,” Reverend Paia said. Mike stood at his side, eyes empty.
Ramos looked up at Reverend Paia. “How long has this man been out?”
“An hour, maybe less.”
“Come,” Ramos said to Louie.
Louie got up and together they hurried down to the helicopter. McCreedy stayed with Mr. Bellows. “You his son?” he asked Casey, and Casey nodded. “He’ll be all right,” McCreedy said. “I’m sure of it.”
Casey closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
Ramos and Louie came back with a stretcher and, along with McCreedy, eased Mr. Bellows onto it. McCreedy needled a tube into Mr. Bellows’s arm. The tube ran up to a bag of liquid. McCreedy handed the bag to me. “Hold this above his body.”
Casey, Louie, and I followed them down to the helicopter and got Mr. Bellows settled in the cabin. Ramos radioed for medical instructions.
“Case,” I said. In that moment I felt a million miles away from him. I didn’t know what to say. I put my hand on his shoulder. He was trembling. “You okay?”
He nodded.
But he wasn’t. I could feel his terror.
McCreedy’s eyes were blue and comforting. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get him to a hospital as quick as we can.”
“Stay with him,” Ramos said to McCreedy, then tapped me and motioned toward another stretcher. I gave Casey’s shoulder a squeeze and jumped out after Ramos. McCreedy and Louie handed down the stretcher. I limped uphill.
Back up at the gathering site, Mike and Reverend Paia with his one good arm were picking things up, getting everyone ready to head to the helicopter.
Dad squatted with Masa and Cappy, trying to help Lenny. The other two paniolos were still with the horses. They’d recovered all five saddles.
Ramos dropped down next to Masa. Dad moved aside as Ramos went to work to stabilize Lenny’s broken bones. Lenny was pale, his humor gone.
I turned and saw Louie and Casey slowly making their way over the rocks with another stretcher. Casey’d tossed his cane, taking the pain in his knee. It was good to see him up and moving. Worrying wasn’t doing him any good.
Slowly, we managed to get everyone into the helicopter. We all drank water.
Louie and I jumped out with Masa and took canteens to the two paniolos with the horses. Masa’s plan was that Cappy would go with Lenny in the helicopter, and the three of them would take the horses back up the trail, hoping there was enough trail left to make it to the top. From there they’d ride up to the Volcano House and call the ranch for a horse truck.
Masa handed the two paniolos canteens. They drank, then poured some into their hands for the horses.
“You think there’s much of a trail left?” Masa said.
“If no got, we make um,” one of them said.
Masa turned to me and Louie. “You boys come up and see us sometime, okay? We friends now, us. So you come. We put you on a couple horses and take you to places people rarely see.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll do it.”
Louie nodded.
Masa pointed at him. “For sure, ah?”
Louie put a hand on his heart. We’d never forget what we shared here at Halape.
Masa grinned and touched his forehead with two fingers in salute. The paniolos mounted and headed out, picking their way up the trail, Masa sitting straight in his saddle.
Minutes later, the copter lifted off and left Halape behind.
A nightmare, fading.
Flying out, we huddled like the wounded being evacuated from a war zone. We were lucky. It could have been a whole lot worse.
The landscape passed by below. The desolate coast, the scorched scrub brush, the fingers of black lava that snaked down from the mountains and spread to the sea. What had been a disaster for us was, for the island, nothing more than a yawn, a stretch, a shrug.
Louie seemed to notice it, too. Or maybe what we’d just been through was starting to sink in, the what-could-have-beens, the what-ifs. He sat across from me, strapped in and facing away from the cut-up and broken bodies spread out on the deck around us.
What was he thinking?
I was trying to imagine the answer when I realized how much I’d been thinking about Louie Domingo.
I took off my glasses and wiped the lenses on my T-shirt. I put them back on and closed one eye. A cracked and fuzzy Louie sat across from me. I closed that eye and opened the other. Crystal clear.
He lifted his chin, What?
I tapped my glasses and mouthed Thanks over the din of the engine.
He held up four fingers and pointed to his eyes—four eyes.
I tapped my butt and my head, then pointed at him.
He grinned and turned away.
Dad tapped my leg, not looking at me, just tapping, as if to say I’m so thankful.
Yeah, I thought. Me too.
I pulled a foot up and studied it. Blood and dirt were caked in and around a field of raw cuts, which were stinging more now that I had time to think about it. Ramos tossed me a pack of disi
nfectant wipes and a roll of gauze. I made another pair of cloth shoes. Not bad. I tossed the wipes and gauze to Louie.
Mr. Bellows lay nearby, still unconscious. Or maybe, I hoped, he was just asleep. Yes, he was just sleeping. Nothing is going to happen to Mr. Bellows. It can’t.
Casey sat silently beside him. Anyone could read his thoughts. Because they were the same for all of us—Nothing is going to happen, he’ll be fine, we’ll all be fine. Including busted-up Lenny, who lay on a stretcher, joking again. Joking! And he was worse off than anyone. Those paniolos must eat spurs for breakfast. Or else McCreedy gave him something to take away the pain.
I thought back to the moment we’d swept up and headed away from Halape. Looking down, I’d seen the horses climbing up the steep slope, another image I’d carry with me awhile. Already I missed Masa, and even the two paniolos I hadn’t gotten to know. Halape hadn’t killed anyone, but it could have. When people share something terrifying like that, it joins them together and makes them a family. Like Masa said, We friends now.
Friends.
“Take it slow, Masa,” I whispered, remembering how even before the earth shook it had been a dangerous trail. “Nice and slow.”
We came down in a quiet corner of Hilo Airport, away from the terminal. It was around four in the afternoon. Two ambulances and a small crowd were waiting for us in a roped-off area on the tarmac. I could see Mom and Dana’s blond heads. Mrs. Bellows was there. And Mike’s mom. Sam’s parents. Billy’s, Zach’s, Tad’s, and all their brothers and sisters, and people I didn’t know, including guys with cameras.
But I saw no one who looked like they might be there for Louie. He knew it would be that way. He didn’t even try to look for anyone. His face was as blank as the first day he came to Scouts.
The pilot shut the engine down. The crowd was held back by a rope attached to two temporary posts as the ambulance crew hurried toward us with rolling stretchers.
I unbuckled and stood. Mom saw me and waved, Dana beside her, stretching over the crowd to see. I gave them an okay sign. Mom’s face flushed with relief. Dana put her arm around her.
Someone dropped the rope and the crowd broke and rushed the helicopter.
Night of the Howling Dogs Page 12
