The Curse of Lono

  Ackerman disagreed, saying they had all probably taken to higher ground long before the surf began hitting the porches. That was standard procedure on Alii Drive in winter storms: first sirens, then roadblocks and panic, and finally forced evacuation of all beachfront homes by Civil Defense rescue teams. "It happens every year," he said. "We lose a few houses, a few cars, but not many people."

  I was still rummaging through the bedrooms, looking for signs of life with one eye and watching the sea with the other. A big one, I knew, could come at any time with no warning at all, rolling over us like a bomb. I had a vision of Ralph clinging, even now, to some jagged black rock far out in the roaring white surf, screaming tor help and feeling the terrible jaws of a wolf eel gripping his leg.

  What would we do if we suddenly heard his screams and saw him thrashing around in the sea a hundred yards away?

  Nothing. We could only watch, as the waves tossed him up on the rocks, time after time. By morning he would be ripped to shreds.

  I was tempted, for a moment, to get a big spotlight and look for him out there in the sea, but I didn't want to do it. What if I spotted him? The sight would haunt me for the rest of my life. . . I would have to watch him die, fixed in the beam of my own spotlight until he finally disappeared, wild eyes gleaming in the foam of a crashing wave, then sinking out of sight. . .

  I heard Ackerman's voice just as a monster wave hit the pool and blasted ten thousand gallons of water straight up in the air.

  I scrambled over the porch railing and ran for the driveway. High ground, I thought. Uphill. Get out of here.

  Ackerman was calling from the balcony of the caretaker's cottage. I rushed up the stairs, soaking wet, and found him sitting at a table with five or six people who were calmly drinking whiskey and smoking marijuana. All my luggage, including the typewriter, was piled in a corner of the porch.

  Nobody had drowned, nobody was missing. I accepted a joint from my fiancée and breathed deeply. Ralph had flipped out sometime around noon, they explained, when the sea hurled a fifty-pound stalk of green bananas up on his porch, followed by a wave of red slime. Hundreds of dead fish washed up on the lawn, the house was suddenly filled with thousands of flying cockroaches, and the sea rolled under the floor.

  The caretaker said Ralph had taken his family to the King Kamehameha Hotel on the pier in downtown Kailua, after failing to find seats on a night flight back to England. "Where's the dog?" I asked. I knew Sadie had become strongly attached to the beast, and there was no sign of its corpse in the general wreckage of the compound.

  "They took it with them," he said. "He asked me to give you this note." He handed me a crumpled piece of hotel stationery, damp and dark with Ralph's scrawl.

  "I can't stand it anymore," it said. "The storm almost killed us. Don't call. Leave us alone. The hotel doctor will take care of Rupert and send him home after quarantine. Please make all arrangements. Do it for Sadie. Her hair is turning white. It was a terrible experience. I'll get even. Love, Ralph."

  "Jesus," I said. "Ralph's gone. He went soft on us."

  "He knew you'd say that," said the caretaker, accepting the joint from Ackerman and inhaling deeply. "That's why he left you the dog. He said it was the right thing to do."

  I refolded the note and put it in my pocket. "Of course," I said. "Ralph is an artist. He has a very keen sense of right and wrong."

  We sat on the porch for a while, smoking fresh marijuana and listening to the Amazing Rhythm Aces, then we drove up to Ackerman's for the night. The compound was flooded and water had soaked all the floors. There was no point in trying to sleep there.

  Ralph was gone and I was too tired to call him on the phone. Soon the whole family would be on a plane back to England, clinging desperately to each other and too exhausted to sleep for more than two or three or four minutes at a time -- like survivors of some terrible shipwreck, only half understanding what had happened to them, disturbing the other passengers with sporadic moans and cries, finally sedated by the stewardess.

  Life is slow on the Kona Coast these days. The fish still feed and the sun still shines and the wind still blows up from Tahiti. . . But there is a new kind of stillness in the air, which has nothing to do with the weather. Bad angst is rampant. People are jumping ship. The whole coast is for sale, and even the wild and beautiful Chang sisters are talking about a move to the mainland. The Kona Boom has gone bust, for a while, and the skimmers are pulling out.

  Nothing I say will change their minds. People like me here, but they are reluctant to trust my judgment.

  So I spend my nights on the balcony of 505, the Queen Kalama Suite in the King Kamehameha Hotel, which has a view of everything-- the whole Kona waterfront, two snowcapped volcanos, and especially the municipal pier on Kailua Bay, where the action never stops.

  I like it up here. I am cultivating a taste for the balcony life. The bill is still in Ralph's name, but no matter. The management will cover it. They have made themselves legally responsible for all problems involving Ralph's dog, which is still under international quarantine. It went mad in the kennel from fleas while under the personal supervision of the hotel veterinarian, and now they are legally responsible. Not only for Rupert but also for any brain damage, swelling, blindness, missed deadlines, loss of income and any other grief, pain or mental anguish resulting from my being stung in the eye by a wasp at the poolside bar. The creature flew into my face and got trapped behind my sunglasses, then it stung me three times in the eye socket. My head swelled up dangerously and all they gave me to cure it was a filthy sock full of ice, which hurt far worse than the sting. And when I asked for help they referred me to Doctor Ho, a "large animal" vet.

  In any case, they have me on their hands now. I control the high ground, as it were, and I refuse to check out until we reach a settlement.

  I have hired a Korean lawyer from Honolulu to negotiate my claim, which is huge. . . and in the meantime I have learned to enjoy this hotel, which is not a bad place to live. There are many fine shops downstairs, and three bars. There is also a big blue pool down below to my right, the Hulihee Palace on the waterfront to my left across the bay, and thick green lawns running out along the seawall to the House of Lono and the funeral site of Kamehameha the Great.

  He died down there in a thatch-roof hut under the royal palm trees on the eighth day of May, 1819, at the age of 61. His body was burned in a firepit and his bones were buried in a secret cave by his main kahunas, who never disclosed the site. King Kam has many monuments in Hawaii, but no tombstone. The same kahunas who buried his bones also ate his heart, for the power that was in it -- just as Kamehameha himself once fed on the heart of Captain Cook.

  KICKING ASS IN KONA

  At the end of the Kailua Municipal Pier is a huge set of scales, maintained by the Japs from the local icehouse who routinely buy every fish brought into the harbor and send it off to Tokyo, to be chopped up into sushimi, then refrozen and sent back to Los Angeles. Sushimi is big business all over the Pacific, and Japanese fish brokers control most of it.

  A license to run sushimi out of Hawaii is better than having a slot machine concession in the Las Vegas airport. There is always more demand for sushimi than the market-fisherman can supply. The only thing that varies is the price -- which ranges from five and sometimes ten dollars a pound at Christmas, down to twenty cents a pound at the peak of the sport-fishing season, which runs from May to September on the Kona Coast and yields between five and ten thousand pounds of sushimi for the market every day.

  Ahi, the big yellowfin tuna, is not a real crowd-pleaser on the pier; but it sells for a lot more money. Ahi is sushimi-- in LA and New York, as well as Tokyo -- and in the weeks before Christmas when demand is running high, the dockside price for a big ahi in Kona can run up to five and sometimes ten dollars a pound.

  Usually it is down around a dollar, which makes it a nice fish to come in with. But ahi is not the glamorous fish in Kona. This place is famous for marlin. B
ig marlin. And that's what the crowd on the pier wants to see. Any boat flying the traditional dark blue marlin flag on its fantail will change the mood of the crowd very suddenly.

  The Kona Coast is the fishing capital of Hawaii, Kailua Bay is the social and commercial axis of the Kona Coast; and the huge gallows-like rig of fish-weight scales on the pier in front of the King Kam Hotel is where the fishing pros of Kona live or die every afternoon of the week -- in full view of the public, such as it is.

  Sport fishing is big business in Kona, and four o'clock on any afternoon at the end of the city pier is showtime for the local charter captains. That is where they bring their fish in to be weighed, and to have their pictures taken if they're bringing in anything big. The big scales at the end of the pier are where the victors show their stuff, and the vanquished don't even show up. The boats with no blood on their decks don't even come in to the pier; they take the short way home -- to the harbor, eight miles north, and those last few miles in from the buoy can be a long and surly ride for a skipper with a boatload of clients who paid $500 a day to catch nothing at all. The Honokohau at sundown is not a happy place to be. As each boatload of failures ties up, the harbor curs rush to the edge of the black lava cliff that looks down on the dock and start barking. They want the leftover lunch meat, not fish, and it is an ugly scene to confront at the end of a long day of failure at sea.

  On any given day most boats will go back to the Honokohau. But the few return to the pier, where the scene is entirely different -- especially on a "hot day," when half the town has already been alerted by triumphant radio calls from far out at sea to prepare the scales for serious action when the fleet comes in.

  The crowd will begin gathering on the end of the pier around three. Jimmy Sloan, the commercial photographer who has the pier concession, will be there with his camera to make the moment live in history on 8 x 10 glossies at $10 each. And there will also be the man from Grey's taxidermy, just in case you want your trophy mounted.

  And if you don't, the little blue Datsun pickup from the Jap icehouse is there to haul it off for cash. Marlin goes cheap: twenty-five cents a pound, because only the Japs will eat it and the main market is in Tokyo, over three thousand miles away.

  The boys who run the scales almost always know what is coming in, but they don't know when. . . which makes them act nervous, as four o'clock rolls around. Any skipper who has already reported a big fish on board will be in by dark, which doesn't leave much time.

  The crowd knows this too. Rumors spread and tourists begin loading cameras. The boats will come in from the west, directly out of the sunset. On a calm day in summer you can stand on the end of the pier and see a boat coming from ten miles out at sea. At first it is just a white spot on the horizon. . . Then a small glint of sunlight, reflected off the highest point of the steel tuna tower. . . And soon the white spot of a roostertail of white spray churned up in the wake of a fast-approaching hull.

  Soon the boat is close enough for people with good binoculars to see the color of the flag the boat is flying on the outrigger pole. The blue stands out better against a background of reddening Pacific sky than the white flag of the ahi -- and it will get the crowd moving toward the scales a lot faster, when the first cry of "blue" goes up.

  Every successful charter boat captain understands the difference between the Fishing Business and Show Business. Fishing is what happens out there on the deep blue water, and the other is getting strangers to pay for it. So when you come swooping into Kailua Bay at sunset with a big fish to hang up on the scales, you want to do it slowly. Ease into the bay in a long graceful arc, against a background of sailboats and volcanos, then back your boat down on the pier with every ounce of style and slow-rumbling boat-handling drama that you and your crew can muster.

  The skipper is up on the flying bridge, facing the crowd and controlling the boat with both hands behind his back on the wheel and throttle. His deckhand and the clients will be standing down below on the stern, also facing the crowd and trying not to do anything wrong or awkward in these last crucial moments, as the boat backs slowly up to the scales and the chain-hoist swings out to pick up their fish.

  Most of the "anglers" who have paid for the privilege of fishing for the big ones with the big boys in the world-record waters off Kona don't give a hoot in hell what happens to whatever fish they've caught, once they've had their pictures taken standing next to the beast as it hangs by its tail from the steel gallows on the end of the pier. The Bringing in of the Fish is the only action in town at that hour of the day -- or any other hour, for that matter; because big-time fishing is what the Kona Coast is all about (never mind these rumors about marijuana crops and bizarre real estate scams).

  Kicking ass in Kona means rumbling into the harbor and up to the scales at sunset with a Big Fish, not three or four small ones, and the crowd on the pier understands this. They will laugh out loud at anything that can be lifted out of a boat by anything less than a crane.

  There is a definite blood-lust in the air around the scales at sundown. By five the crowd is drunk and ugly. People on their first vacation out of Pittsburgh are standing around on the pier and talking like jaded experts about fish the size of the compact cars they just rented out at the airport.

  "How big is that thing, Henry?"

  "It's real big, dear. The sign on the scale says one-twenty-two, but that's probably just the head. The body looks about the size of a cow; I'd guess about a thousand."

  The action around the scales on the pier in Kailua Bay at sundown is serious drama, and the tension picks up as each new boat comes in. By five o'clock on a good day they are yelling for thousand-pounders, and woe to the local charter captain who shows up with anything small.

  But there is no escape from the judgment of the crowd, because even a 100-pound ahi can be sold off to the icehouse Japs for $2.78 a pound in June -- enough to pay off the whole day's fuel and cruising costs -- and the price of not bringing it into the scales for the crowd to see and the Japs to buy is too high for any serious skipper to pay. They charge a lot of money for services rendered, and one of these services is getting their clients photographed on the pier with any fish they caught -- even a fine little 90-pound marlin that might have almost torn the arms off the person who caught it and that everybody on the boat has been telling him -- right up to that moment of truth on the scales -- "must be at least five hundred."

  All fish look huge when they jump 20 feet straight up in the air on the end of your line and 200 yards aft of the boat. And a hundred pounds feels like a million, after you've fought it for two or three hours; and, for $500 a day, most clients have already fallen in love with the thing anyway, by the time they reel it in.

  They want that 8 x 10 color photograph that comes with bringing it into the pier and having it hoisted up on the gallows in full view of the whole crowd, for good or ill. The only thing worse than coming in with a "rat" is coming in with nothing at all.

  James King was equally troubled. He had been the first of the shore party to learn of the theft of the cutter. He had been hailed by Burney as he was rowed close by the Discovery en route to the Resolution. Clerke had just returned to his ship, and King arrived on board at the critical moment when Cook had decided on the more positive and dangerous action.

  When King began to recount the details of the previous evening's occurrences, Cook had interrupted him "with some eagerness," as King reported. "It is my intention, Mr. King," Cook had announced grimly, "to bring on board and detain the king and some of the chiefs as hostages against the return of the cutter." Cook completed to his satisfaction the loading of his musket. "Your business is to quiet the minds of the Indians on your side of the bay. Inform them that they will not be hurt. And, Mr. King, keep your party together and on their guard."

  King stepped into his boat just before his captain embarked in the pinnace. He watched the pinnace, escorted by Williamson in the launch and Lanyon in the small cutter, proceed north from
the Resolution towards the landing place at Kaawaloa. King landed on the beach by the heiau and was met by Bayly, who was anxiously awaiting news. The hostile murmur was scarcely audible here, being carried away on the easterly wind. But there was an atmosphere of tense expectation among the marines, carpenters, sailmakers and others in the encampment, as well as among the natives who stood about uneasily.

  Several canoes had been launched, including one under the command of that important and vigorous Chief Kalimu, but had been deterred from paddling far out into the bay by the fate of the canoe from Kaawaloa. King remembered Cook's last words, ordered Ledyard to post his men with muskets loaded with ball, and to open fire under provocation, and then proceeded to High Priest Koa's house.

  Koa and his priests were in a nervous condition. "I explained to them, as well as I could, the object of the hostile preparations," King wrote in his report. "I found that they had already heard of the cutter's being stolen, and I assured them that though Captain Cook was resolved to recover it, and to punish the authors of the theft, yet that they and the people of the village on our side need not be under the smallest apprehension of suffering any evil from us."

  Richard Hough

  The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

  FUCK YOU, I'M RICH

  Ralph's tragic and unexpected departure from the islands had left me with a swarm of odd problems, some of them far more serious than the fate of Sadie's dog. Half of Ackerman's marijuana crop had been ripped off sometime during the night when he was on the boat with us at South Point, by cops or somebody else. Either way, he said, it was time to harvest the rest of it and get out of town for a while. "They'll be back, for sure," he said, "and if it was the cops they'll have a warrant next time. I have to yank it now. We're talking about two hundred thousand dollars."