Riptide

by Paul Levine

  * * *

  The wind let up at sundown, just a puff by Maui standards, twelve to fifteen knots from the northeast. He could sail on a starboard tack all the way across the Pailolo Channel. From the beach at Honokahua he could see Molokai, silhouetted in the darkness, rising like a black monolith, its southern coastline a jungle devoid of lights. The night was clear and a three-quarter moon cast a milky glow on the peaking waves. Lassiter fell once getting beyond the surf line, but once was enough. Freezing now, a shivering, bone-deep cold.

  The water was choppy and the board pitched beneath him, but in a few minutes his legs were making the adjustments, knees bending, weight shifting without any message from his brain, just doing it on autopilot. At the same time, his arms were letting out the sail and raking it in, allowing the rhythms of the wind and water dictate the movements. It was peaceful here on the black sea and he wanted to enjoy it before the quiet was shattered on a desolate island.

  The dark monolith grew larger and Lassiter was aware of how small he was, bucking the waves on a fiberglass board, an infinitesimal speck on a vast sea. It made him think of the insignificance of what he would do, at least in the universal scheme of things. If Keaka would die, or if he would die, the moon would still pass through its phases, and the tide would still rise and fall. We are born, puny and weak, and set afloat on the waters of a small planet in a runty solar system, and if we capsize, as we surely will, there will be others, just as puny, to take our place. Everything we have created, good and bad, will fade and crumple and be lost to the winds of time. Those who mourn our departure will pass, too, so that all memories of us will die in the flicker of a cosmic eyelash. Rather than depress him, these thoughts calmed Lassiter with the knowledge that life was so fleeting, it was useless to waste precious moments in a state of fear.

  He was thinking these thoughts, wondering if he would be alive to share them with Doc Riggs, when he felt something. Felt it before he heard it.

  The water beneath him moving.

  Suddenly, an explosion.

  A deafening concussion and a wall of water that engulfed him.

  The sea rose from beneath Lassiter and hurled him into the blackness. He belly-flopped into the channel, graceful as a rhinoceros. He kicked twice and surfaced, eyes stinging, a gash on the forehead where the boom had sideswiped him. His first thought was that his board had hit some unexploded Japanese mine from World War II. But treading water, Jake Lassiter saw it, or at least part of it: the mammoth tail of a humpback whale visible forty feet above the water, the rest of the animal hidden below. Then a prehistoric shove, the tail whipped once, and the beast slipped under the sea. Another wave swamped Lassiter, and he tasted salt water, raw in his throat.

  Save the whales! My ass.

  It was the migrating season for humpback whales, and one had breached alongside of him. Lassiter was still treading water when he realized that his board wasn’t next to him. He had lost precious seconds watching the whale, and the board had drifted away. If Lassiter were ten feet above the water, he could have seen the moon glowing off the fiberglass or illuminating the sail. But he was mostly under the water, kicking his legs to keep his nose high enough to breathe. Lila’s harness was too small for his chest and pressed hard against his rib cage. It had no flotation material and the weight of the metal simply made him heavier. He was growing tired. He could swim in the direction he thought the board had drifted, but make a mistake, chase the wrong receiver, the coach would scream, and the board would be halfway to Tahiti.

  He looked through the darkness toward Molokai. He looked back toward Maui, getting his bearings, then swam twenty yards downwind and there it was, the boom lying across the stern of the board, waiting for him to pick it up. The wind was barely strong enough to water-start, but he got it going, then checked his gear. The Colt Python was still snug in the harness pouch, but the three pounds of stainless steel now bashed his shoulder blade with every wave. He carried something else, too: a ton of fatigue. His arms were dead, and his legs no longer responded to the sea, the adrenaline having been sapped. He thought of a November homecoming game played in a sleet storm in old Beaver Stadium, his uniform and pads weighted down by icy water, black high-tops caked with frozen mud.

  Wasted. Out of shape. Winded, breathing through the mouth now. His mind wandered. Too much happening too fast, he thought. You don’t run into many whales if you spend your days trying lawsuits in an old courthouse on Flagler Street.

  He could hear the water breaking now over shallow reefs. In the distance he saw the tiny lights from the town of Kaluaaha where the road ended on Molokai and the jungle swallowed the night. .He looked for the lighted weather buoy and it was there, just as Lila said it would be, and he had a clear passage through the rocks to the shore.

  Then there was a sound. At first Jake Lassiter thought it must have been a phenomenon of the wind whistling through the rocks. It was a voice without direction. It came from nowhere and everywhere.

  “Aloha, haole.”

  Lassiter heard it again, closer this time. “Aloha, haole. Are you looking for me?”

  Beside him now, emerging from the darkness, riding easily over the small waves, was Keaka Kealia. He was sailing ten yards away, hands lightly grasping his boom, wearing a loincloth made of animal skin. The Hawaiian out for a nighttime joyride, Lassiter thought, crazily, the danger not yet sinking in. Then he saw it dangling from Keaka’s shoulder — an Uzi, the Israeli submachine gun. The water was growing more shallow, but the waves were increasing as they passed over the reef and Lassiter was unsteady. Keaka sailed slightly behind him and Lassiter kept shooting glances over his left shoulder.

  “I’m still here, haole. I want to see what you do when you get to shore, if you get to shore.” Then Keaka raked in the boom, pulling the sail over the board, leaned back, and shot by Lassiter, cutting inches in front of him, heading toward the beach, the Uzi swinging ominously from his shoulder.

  There were not many choices, Jake Lassiter thought. He could head for shore, ditch the rig in the surf and swim in, hiding in the massive boulders along the rocky beach. Or he could try to reach the gun in his pack, and then …

  A flash of light interrupted him, the moon reflecting off the bottom of Keaka’s board. The Hawaiian must have jibed, for now he was headed straight at Lassiter, jumping over the lips of the breaking waves while Lassiter surfed down their front heading in. Another wave, another jump, and Keaka was bearing down on him. They were on a collision course, drawing closer with each second.

  Keaka hit a wave, timed it just right, and lifted off. Then with his ankles, he pulled the board onto its side, perpendicular to the water, a mule-kick. The board’s sharp fin whizzed by Lassiter’s ear and slashed a three-foot-long tear in his sail.

  Lassiter toppled off the board, his harness still hooked into the boom lines, the torn sail wrapped around him, his head under water, his lungs out of breath. Keaka Kealia brought his board out of the jump and landed gracefully as a cat, never losing his balance. He jibed and swung back around to find his prey floundering under the sail, trying to kick himself free.

  Keaka shouted at him,” Aloha, haole! Hello and good-bye.”

  Struggling under the water, Lassiter never heard the Hawaiian.

  Keaka held the boom with one hand and sailed by slowly, luffing the sail. He aimed the Uzi at the back of Lassiter’s harness, still wrapped in the sail, and squeezed off a quick burst of nine-millimeter shells. Then Keaka raised the gun above his head and sailed to shore singing ancient war songs in the language of his ancestors.

  CHAPTER 29

  The King of Siam

  Jake Lassiter was afraid of drowning. Taking a bullet was a secondary concern. Tangled up under the sail, still hooked into the boom, he flipped the quick-release bar on the harness and swam under the board and out the other side. He was just surfacing when he heard the popping of the Uzi, and after a quick breath, he went under again. He held his breath until his lungs gave out, and then he held it
some more, exhaling air until there was nothing left. When he came up a second time, Keaka was gone, though his voice could be heard, a maniacal wailing in the night.

  The waves pounded Lassiter and spun him around. He lost his sense of direction, tried to figure out where he was, finally deciding somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea. Treading water, he bobbed in the waves, knowing it would take a superhuman effort to swim to shore and avoid being sliced to ribbons on the coral. He took a breath, stretched out, and body-surfed fifty yards on the next good-sized roller. He stopped, treaded water again, and tried to locate the boulders in the moonlight.

  Then another voice, only this one familiar and sweet, and for a moment Jake Lassiter wondered if the bullets hadn’t really hit him, and maybe he was drifting off to wherever you go if you haven’t been a saint but you never strangled kittens either.

  “Jake, are you all right?” Lila’s voice, a whisper among the waves. He turned to find her and caught a breaker in his open mouth and swallowed salt water again, but there she was on a board, talking to him. “Climb up. Just grab the last foot strap, pull yourself up to your knees, and hang on.”

  It was a bumpy ride, the board bouncing in the surf, his extra weight fouling up Lila’s balance like a little brother on the back of a kid’s bike. Then the shore break caught them and slammed the board hard against a rock at water’s edge. There was a cr-ack, and they tumbled into the water, the board nosing up on a boulder. Her fin had snapped in two. She retrieved the broken piece, nearly a foot long, curved and sharp as a saber, and hauled the rig onto the beach. The beach was narrow and rocky and ended in a black jungle of bushes, trees, and. towering ferns. Without pausing to rest, Lila dragged the board into the heavy undergrowth. She came back and knelt beside Lassiter, who was lying on his back at the water’s edge.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Lassiter coughed and gave back some of the Pacific Ocean. “I’m alive and five minutes ago I didn’t think I would be, so I’m fine. What are you … how did you … why?”

  “Jake, I knew you wouldn’t let me come along, but I wasn’t going to let you get killed. Do you understand now you have no chance here?”

  He sat up but didn’t answer.

  Lila said, “I was about a quarter mile behind you when I heard the gunfire. Keaka must think you’re dead. Somewhere in this vegetation, he has two or three boards and complete rigs. We can get some rest, then sail back before sunrise.”

  “Sail back? No. I came to do a job, and …”

  But he stopped himself, because he knew it was just talk, he was just jabbering away on autopilot. You start something, you finish it. Yeah, sure. Hit that line. Sis, boom, bah. Talk’s cheap, until you’ve been shot at and left for dead.

  He surveyed the damage. His board and rig were gone. The harness and gun, too. All he had left were his boxer trunks and a million goose bumps. If he didn’t get shot, he might die of hypothermia. “All right. We’ll sail back. If I ever get back to the mainland, the closest I’ll get to the ocean will be Kansas.”

  Lila crouched in the sand, her face luminous in the moonlight. “We should split up and look for those boards. Try not to make any noise. Keaka’s camp is only a mile up the slope and he’s often out at night, walking in the jungle.”

  She used the sharp point of the broken fin to draw a map in the sand, showing Lassiter the location of Keaka’s path into the jungle and advising him to stay clear. Lila headed west along the beach, Lassiter east, poking into the bushes, looking for the boards. His feet were cut from the rocks and he was freezing. The black boulders lining the shore took on shapes of strange animals and seemed to follow him. The wind picked up and died, and sounds came from the rocks, howls and shrieks and taunting laughter. He thought of all the places he would rather be, the list filling a dozen yellow legal pads in his mind. Who would go on a mission like this? A putz, Sam Kazdoy would say.

  He couldn’t tell how much time had passed. A few minutes, a half hour. He didn’t see Lila, and he didn’t find any boards. Then, a hallucination. What else could it be, a nude woman on the deserted coast of Molokai? There in front of him, not twenty feet away, backlit by the moon over the channel, a petite young woman emerged from the sea, water dripping over small breasts and onto her firm stomach. She looked directly at Lassiter but was silent. Even in the dark, she looked familiar. She looked to her left and Lassiter followed her gaze and as he turned, the moon burst into a thousand suns, his brain jolted as if hit by a sledgehammer. He was on his knees, fighting off the nausea, straining to focus his eyes.

  Through the fog he heard Coach Shula yelling at him, or was it Paterno? “Keep your feet, Lassiter! Body square to the line, don’t get blindsided by the tight end. Damnit, eighty-two just cleaned your clock. Now get up and hit somebody!”

  Lassiter stood up but didn’t see the tight end. They might have scored by now, who knows, you drift into the middle, the lights go out.

  A voice again, rattling around in his brain, but not the coach. “What’s this neighborhood coming to? A man can’t take his wahine out for a midnight swim without some trash drifting ashore.”

  Somewhere through the haze, Lassiter saw two Keaka Kealias and two nude women, and they were dancing around him as if he were the Maypole. “You surprised me, haole” Keaka said, the Uzi still slung on his shoulder. “I thought you would stay in your air-conditioned office, but I learned that you were here, at first I thought for Lila, then I learn, for the bonds. You are a foolish man, because you can’t have either one. You should have stayed home with your big, cushy job and your flat water. You could have lived to be an old man, playing gin rummy at your country club. You are even more of a fool than the little man, Marlin. The goddess of the volcano spared you last night on Crater Road. It was a signal for you to leave, to go home. But you ignored it, violated the kapu of the gods, and now you must pay the price.”

  Keaka seemed to be waiting for him to say something, but the cobwebs were still hanging on. “Why are you on Molokai, haole? The bonds are not here. They are in my favorite place, a place known only to me and that haole slut you like so much.”

  “I came to kill you,” Lassiter said.

  That made the Hawaiian laugh. “Good. You will die on the rocks like Captain Cook, a stupid haole like yourself.”

  The world was coming into focus now, and Jake Lassiter saw that Keaka’s loincloth was gone. In naturalibus, Charlie Riggs would have said. The Hawaiian stood there with his feet spread apart, hands on his hips, a warrior king surveying his kingdom, now sullied by an intruder. Lassiter summoned a calm voice. “I should advise you that I left explicit instructions as to where I was going. If I’m not back in the morning, there’ll be a search party.”

  Keaka laughed again. “Who did you tell, Captain Kalehauwehe? You seemed to tell him everything else.” He gestured with the Uzi to start walking toward the jungle.

  Then another voice. “Keaka, don’t do it. Let him go, he can’t hurt you.” Lila Summers was there, coming out of the darkness, trying to rescue him again.

  Keaka was startled, but only for a moment. “What a pleasant surprise. My two wahines together. Lila, unlike you, Little Lee knows which side to choose in a fight. Even after what happened in Miami, she is with me, though she doesn’t care much for you.” He turned toward Little Lee. “Lila used to be my friend and lover, but lately the bitch has been hanging around with haole scum.”

  “Let him go,” Lila said again, firmly. But whatever power she once had over him was gone. Keaka just smirked at her, enjoying the situation, his two women there to witness his power, his unsheathed masculinity on center stage. Lee Hu had wrapped a towel around her small body and glared at Lila. ‘

  Keaka held out his arms as if to embrace both women. “We will all go to the camp, to my hale. It will be like old times. It is a fine place for a man and his wahines to make love.”

  “Has it come to this?” Lila asked. “Are you conquering me, too?”

 
“If you had been loyal to me, it would not have been necessary.”

  He gestured with the gun to begin moving. Keaka stayed at the rear, holding the Uzi lightly by the vertical clip. The path was rugged and uphill, strewn with rocks and overgrown with barbed limbs. Every step brought a branch in the face, sharp twigs cutting across neck and shoulders. Lassiter’s feet were bleeding from tiny cuts and his head throbbed with pain. His legs barely moved. His mind kept playing tricks on him, black-and-white footage from World War n, the Bataan Death March.

  They came to a clearing where a small fire glowed orange. Lee Hu threw two logs into the coals and sparks flew into the night. Keaka stood by the fire and Lee Hu knelt before him as if she were his subject, and he the king. The image brought something back to Lassiter. What was it Lila had said that first night in the restaurant? Keaka thought he was the reincarnation of Kame-ha-ha the Great or something. Another crazy thought, Lassiter said to himself, wondering if he was delirious from the salt water and one smack to the head. And then suddenly, it became clear to him, so clear that he laughed.

  “What’s so funny, haole? Do you find your own death humorous?”

  Keaka stood there with legs spread, hands on his hips, his Hawaiian manhood thick and proud, tumescent from the excitement of a kill, maybe more exciting than the other kills because two women were here to watch.

  “Lila said you think you’re a king,” Lassiter said. “And what you look like is the king of Siam, Yul Brynner in The King and I. Strutting around with your hands on your hips, only difference is he wore silk knickers, you’re letting your pecker hang out, but either way, I keep waiting for you to sing ‘Shall We Dance?’”