Primal Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “In the bus?” she had asked, amused.

  “No, I have a car of my own, a nice car.”

  “Really? But I have a boyfriend.”

  “Is he coming to pick you up?”

  “No, he's too lazy. I have to take the bus usually.”

  He'd quickly countered with, “If you were my girl, you wouldn't never ride no public bus.”

  She'd only smiled coyly at this. So he had repeated his offer to drive her home, finishing with, “What do you say?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. I'll see when I see,” she'd teased.

  He recognized bait when he smelled it, and he easily assumed that Hiilani was just as loose and fast as Kelia had been; she just hid it well behind her white smock and long braids, which, if allowed to fall, would trail to her back like Kelia's. While not terribly bright, Hiilani held down a regular job. She wasn't a college girl or a streetwalker like some of the others. She was different from Kia and Linda from the university, who'd both ridden for free in his bus when he'd taken another driver's route for two weeks. They'd teased him about being a bus driver, because earlier in class, he'd bragged about working on a big ranch nearby, saying one day he'd become a lawyer or possibly a doctor. A simple check with the registrar might have told either girl that he was barely capable of paying for one class, let alone a full load, and that he was a failing part-timer at the university.

  He had flirted with Kia Wailea, telling her all kinds of stories about himself, building himself up to her. She had seemed disinterested until he suddenly surprised her on the strip, where, after several nights of hunting for a new Kelia, he saw her taking on johns for money. It wasn't long before her friend Linda was doing the same. He saw them in broad daylight doing this; he saw it all from the big tinted windshield of his bus.

  It was then that Lopaka began to steadily watch his two classmates to learn their routines. He knew from experience that everyone had a routine, that people walked through patterns of existence that dug ruts as deep as canals, and these two girls were no exception. He counseled himself to be patient, to present himself to the girls whenever and wherever possible as a harmless but interested fellow. He was careful not to pressure either of them, but at the same time to learn their likes. Linda, for instance, was a poetry lover and wanted to write poetry, so he located the only book of poetry he owned, an ancient relic left him by his mother, the only item he'd ever known that belonged to her, a book of Shakespeare's sonnets. It endeared him somewhat to Kia, and greatly to Linda, to give her his mother's book of poems. Some years before giving Linda the book, he'd read the sonnets himself, and he'd underlined passages that appealed to him. The underlined passages spoke to him and to her, the hunter and the hunted in intimate conversation, he thought. Surely, she must know to stay away from him after that, he thought. Meanwhile, he continued to hold an inordinate power over the girls, for he knew their daily routines as well as they. It was only a matter of time before he struck. At the exact right moment, he meant to intersect Kia's and Linda's pathways, so that their meeting by chance beamed brightly like a flash of fate, a surprising crisscross of serendipity, when in fact it was well timed and practiced.

  Even when Kia, the more streetwise of the two, questioned that fate, and he confessed to following her, she found it romantic that he should go to such lengths. She teased at first, calling him a stalker, then laughing at her own joke, never really believing him capable of anything but total adoration and awe. Then, too late, she learned the truth of his hunt.

  Not for the first time does he realize that the very anonymity of his job, and of the large city of Honolulu, makes success in his hunt possible. The fact he has no friends, no relatives any longer—for they have long since abandoned him—and the fact he is considered an introvert and an 'ae 'e, a wandering, shiftless, rootless, unstable soul, an awkward 'ano'e, and odd duck as the whites say, shying from crowds, parties, relatives, presenting a stiff arm to others—all of it aides in the hunt.

  No one has willingly come to his bungalow since Kelia left years before.

  Still Hiilani, he tells himself, is a high risk. She has close family ties from what he can tell, and already the island families are outraged about the disappearances of Kia and Linda. It may be safest to go elsewhere tonight in his hunt. He might just return to the Waikiki strip to meet for the fourth or fifth time that heavily made-up streetwalker named Terri, but there's something not quite right about her. There's no way she's a native, despite her dress and that horrid, long black wig she wears, but she does—in her costume—look something like Kelia, and if he were to ignore the fact Terri has no Polynesian blood whatsoever, he might imagine her to be another Kelia.

  She could be a cop posing as a hooker, he fears. If not, she's obviously an American girl who's gone native. Terri is slender, petite—Kelia's size—pretty, willing enough if the price is right, but he wants her to come regardless of any transaction. He wants her to open herself to him, to make herself vulnerable to him the way Hiilani already has, the way Kia and Linda did. But there's a hard edge to this Terri that speaks of experience.

  Linda was different. Lopaka had to lure and bait her over a longer period of time, and even when he did strike, she'd been weakened more by the sudden disappearance of her friend Kia than by him. She didn't particularly wish to go with him that night. While many others followed him like stray dogs to their deaths, Linda did not go so peaceably. She fought. She hurt and even scarred him. She was more like Kelia in that way than any of the others. So, he wonders now, which Kelia is it to be tonight? The streetwalker or the liquor-store clerk who likes to peek at the dirty magazines?

  Either way, he will be doing the work of gods....

  He often daydreams on his route, even as he tells the tourists what they want to hear; it is one of his few pleasures. His daydreams surround his killing fantasy. He re-invents the moment of attack, binding the limbs, attaching them to the rack he has built especially to hold Kelia helplessly against the wall, a rack like that used by his father against those who broke the law in the village. He relives those dark-time moments with Linda, with Kia, with all the Kelias he has sent over to Ku and in whose destruction he has found gleeful satisfaction, far beyond sexual fulfillment, he assures himself, for with each killing he comes one step closer to his own godhood.

  Sometimes his daydreams become inextricably mixed with memories; memories he'd just as soon forget, reshape or counterfeit, memories of hurt and humiliation so intense they must be forged anew if any of it is to make sense. Yet it was in those early years—even as an infant, humiliation and all—that he was first contacted by the running-wind gods to become their servant. The trade winds rocked his cradle.

  Remembrance is painful and he hides from it always, yet it finds him, creeps into his daydreams, slithers into his bed, catches him at the wheel and at his weakest moments. Since he is unable to fully escape, a black and inky depression pours over his soul, blotting all else out. Childhood: No matter how he tries, his huge father finds him. His father still wants him to one day become him, but Lopaka has decided on another fate, one offered by a higher power than his earthly father. He escaped his father's tyrannical domination, escaped the place of his birth, the backward life of his youth, when his father sent him away, ostensibly to gain a deep, abiding understanding of the world through a Western education.

  His freedom won, he found himself venting his pent-up rage on the unsuspecting in his midst, first on Maui, until his marriage to Kelia when, for a time, he was in control of his primal urges. Still, his angry father, never understanding the depths to which Lopaka had sunk, was enraged on learning that his son had married without consent or traditional ceremony. His father not only cut off all funds for him, but all contact as well, banishing him from ever returning to his island home of Molokai. He had dared to marry below himself, to marry a mixed-blood at that, to take a noanoa, a common peasant, for a wife. Hypocritically, the old man, chief of his puny tribe, had taken in a white woman, living in s
in, giving birth to Lopaka, but she had been, according to his royal father, a “high-born haole.”

  As a boy of four, he had seen his twin brother die when the ministrations and incantations employed by his father failed miserably to save the boy from a disease that had spread across their homeland. Lopaka, like his deformed brother, Lopeko, was infected with the contagion and very nearly lost his own life at that time. Often now, as in the past, he wishes it had been him whom the gods had taken.

  He saw his brother's body taken away by the woman his father would later take as his second wife. He felt the flames of the fire as the little body of his brother was placed upon a stack of others and bumed. He cried out that his brother was still alive, that he could feel the flames scalding his living flesh; Lopaka had the welts on his body to prove it, but no one listened; they assumed it was the fever talking. Lopeko's bones were cast into the sea for fear they would contaminate the burial ground.

  Later, as he grew older, Lopaka began to see his father's cruelty, hidden as it was behind a veneer of civility, law and custom, yet clearly present. He also began to slowly realize that his father and he did not look at all alike, and that his father was desperate to have more sons, to replace the misbegotten one, the one without the 'ele'ele, the luminous black color of the Hawaiian eyes, but rather with pale blue eyes, so it was not long before Lopaka realized that he was an embarrassment to his father, a defilement. That while he was the son of the mokoi, he'd been conceived by a haole who'd brought death and disease to the people. Lopaka's mother, too, had succumbed to the devastating disease which she had brought to the village.

  His father's attempts to have more children became common knowledge, and everyone in the village spoke behind Lopaka's back about the evil the white blood in him had brought to the village, and how the chief could not possibly pass on his powers to this pale son.

  An outsider who never fit in, he became a misfit at an early age, keeping to himself, living an all-but-mute existence, hearing not the voices of loving parents each night, but falling asleep to the whispered curses of anger, disappointment and distrust coming out of his own father.

  For years he tried desperately to change his father's mind and the mind of the community, attempting to be him, mimicking the man, following him around like a dog, gazing up at him with admiration and feigned love. He wore the ceremonial lei and garb of the son of a chief, carried the ceremonial knives and clubs, and generally played the part fate had meted out to him in a pathetic attempt to win acceptance from everyone around him. At the same time, he secretly cursed his stepmother and asked the gods of the air and the earth to make her barren. Unable to have children, the stepmother was soon replaced by another, but she, too, could not give the chief another child, for Lopaka's evil magic was powerful. It was the first time the gods granted him his wish, and they opened his eyes to the true nature of his brother's death. It was a death that Lopaka knew in his heart had nothing whatever to do with the disease.

  That healing lotion of his own brain that hid such horrors from the conscious child had placed the terror so far away that he'd lost all memory of it until the wind voices came to remind him. They opened his eyes to what his mind had closed on, that young, deformed Lopeko did not die of his illness but by the ceremonial sword belonging to his father. The gods told him that the hand wielding the sword had been his father's, that Lopeko had been an embarrassment to him.

  No matter how he tried, Lopaka—a constant, brooding reminder to his father of all the taboos he'd broken—could never fit in, and in fact had good reason to fear for his own life; he was marked from birth and by the death of his twin, and there was no changing the public mind about him. There were other children in the village considered perfect, the epitome of the race, the last vestiges of it, in fact—children who were full-bloods, with rich smiles and warm, radiant 'ele'ele eyes that told of an ancient ancestry, their little bottoms and sturdy legs thick, their baby skin swarthy and their lives filled with freedom and happiness. And when one of their pet birds or dogs disappeared, found later to have been brutally slain with a long blade, it was held up as a warning to them to never tempt the demons of the night and the forests.

  Lopaka's earliest memories of creating a state of non-existence in a living creature were now like the playful struggling and curiosity of a child over a complex jigsaw puzzle. Yet those first experiments in creating death where there had been life had stirred in him feelings and sexual emotions he'd never before touched. It was a kind of crude baptism for him, and his newfound religion quickly escalated when he began to lure smaller children into the forests, where he delighted in humiliating and hurting them, until one day a little girl named Alaya was found dead, her body brutally savaged and fed upon by the forest beasts and perhaps some supernatural demons known to lurk in the black shadows amid the mountains.

  No one suspected that the demon was the boy who'd lured Alaya into those woods with promises; no one suspected—least of all the other children—not even those whom Lopaka had practiced his little tortures on. No one but his father. Yet Lopaka simply braved it out, strutting about, pretending to be his father, the little keiki ali'i, doling out justice and punishment at the court of his peers just as he'd seen his father, the ali'i kane, do a thousand times The gods sometimes told him that his father was not his true father, that they were; that Lopaka was spawned from the seed of the supernatural. He didn't at first believe this, but as he grew older, more and more signs pointed to the fact that he was not in any way like his father.

  His first killing was unintentional. He was hardly into his teens at the time, and Alaya was a trusting eleven-year-old. He might not have killed her had she not had such a vile temper and nasty tongue, had she not screamed out what everyone else thought of him....

  He recalls now with a cold and clear memory, like a photographer interested in light and shadow, just how slowly he eased the knife into the child's limb only to maim. She fainted immediately, and he, using one of his father's ceremonial blades, continued to cut. He had learned much from his father, how to get the most out of a torture victim. Still, it surprised him to learn when the little girl's blood gushed forward that he was moved to a higher plane of feeling. The next wound and subsequent ribbon of red lace over her throat so excited him that he was filled with delirious joy, a kind of ecstasy that forced a ritual dance from him.

  He was sexually aroused by the little girl's pain, the suffering making him stiffen in his private parts, the blood begging him to taste of death, to take it on his fingers and lap it up....

  The entire attack lasted only a few minutes, but within that compressed moment he'd stabbed the girl thirty, perhaps forty times before he was completely spent, using his blade as his penis, totally destroying her. The act blotted out all of her kind—anyone who dared question him or despise him.

  It was the first time that his subconscious had authenticated the trinity, the three-way link between the voices in his head, his need for sexual arousal, and the fact he could only reach it through physical violence. Before this, any sexual arousal had been lukewarm and minimal at best, but now it was fiery and fullblown.

  Memories, he thinks now, sitting behind the wheel of his clean, air-conditioned bus, have a place, but he prefers memories that arouse him sexually, so he draws most on memories of his recent bloodlettings.

  The little bus he drives now bumps off busy H-l, Kamehameha Freeway, and runs the familiar and crowded off-ramp to Pearl Harbor. The bus winds its way around to the lawns of the well-kept entrance of Pearl Harbor, toward the site of the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, with its bones entombed underwater. Lopaka's passengers, fully two-thirds being curious Japanese citizens with cameras in hand, are prepared to record what they consider their history, regardless of what American textbooks say about the war in the Pacific.

  So together, American and Japanese tourists, along with Australians, New Zealanders, Europeans and others from around the globe, will go by solemn Coast Guard cutter out to the sunke
n World War II battleship. There, shoulder to shoulder, they'll read the list of names in alphabetical order on a “wailing wall” monument, the names of privates and noncoms, officers and marines, from H. Aaron to M. Zwarun, Jr. Then the tourists will stand over the underwater tomb of over eleven hundred men, a 184-foot crypt of shattered metal seen clearly through the crystal waters of the harbor only four feet below the concrete platform built over the forecastle of the sunken ship, a liquid rainbow of leaking oil still rippling over the stern after fifty years.

  The bus comes to a jerking stop, and the door opens with a swishing sound; Lopaka gets off the bus with his passengers, leads them like children to the gate and haggles with the ticket-handler for twenty-four discounts for his tour group, discounts they're to receive for riding the Enoa Bus Line. He sleepwalks through the process and then tells his passengers where and when to meet after the sightseeing is finished. This done, he returns to his bus and takes it out of the entrance lanes, to park and wait and think more about tonight, about Hiilani, whom he has finally chosen.

  11

  Fate sits on these dark battlements and frowns....

  Ann Radcliffe

  1:05 P.M. July 16, 1995, Panlolo's bar. Honolulu

  The raid on Paniolo's bar and grill near the university netted some suspicious blood spatters and other stains lingering after what appeared a hasty cleanup, but no ready evidence of George Oniiwah's having been held hostage there was turned up. Nonetheless, employees and any standing clientele were all arrested on drug charges, as both cocaine and heroin on the premises were sniffed out by dogs trained in the art. A little time in interrogation, a little wheeling and dealing, and someone in Paniolo's employ or sphere of enfluence would give the cretin up, or at least spill something about the missing boy, or so Parry believed.