"What?" he said. "South Point?"
"Yeah," I replied. "Just you and me and Steve. He says the weather should be okay, once we get around the point."
He laughed. "That's insane," he said, "but what the hell, why not? Steve's okay. He's a pretty good sailor."
"Good," I said, "let's do it. At least we'll get out on the water."
He chuckled. "Yeah. We will do that." He finished off the joint and flipped it into the sea. "I'll bring some chemicals," he said. "We may need them." "Chemicals?"
He nodded. "Yeah. I have some powerful organic mescaline. I'll bring it along."
"Right," I said. "That's a good idea -- in case we get tired."
He slapped me on the back as we walked inside to the table. "Welcome to the Kona Coast, Doc. You're about to get what you came for.
WE'RE ALL EQUAL IN THE OCEAN
I took Juan to the airport the next morning for the flight to Honolulu. He'd had a good time, he said -- especially with the bombs and the high-speed driving lessons -- but he was not unhappy to be leaving. "There's too much tension," he said. "Everybody seems just about to go crazy. I couldn't stand living this way very long."
"You'll learn," I said. "You get used to it after a while."
"Or else you go nuts," he said with a grin. We were walking down the breezeway toward the Aloha Airlines loading gate, surrounded by dozens of Japs.
"Yeah," I said. "That's right. Totally nuts."
We walked the rest of the way in silence. The look on his face was pensive, vaguely amused. When we got to the gate the plane was about to leave, so he had to run for it. I watched him loping across the tarmac toward the plane and smiled. How long has he known -- I thought -- that Uncle Ralph is crazy?
On the way back to town I stopped by the Haere Marue and found Captain Steve already on the boat, wrestling tanks of compressed air off the dock and into a storage locker near the stern. He looked up as I scrambled down the ledge of black rocks to where the boat was tied up. "Ackerman was just here," he said. "I guess he's serious about making the trip."
"Yeah," I said. "I gave him the grocery list."
"I know," he said. "He's gone to Tanagughi's to get the stuff. All we need now is booze."
"And ice," I said, turning to climb back up the rocks. "How's the weather look?"
"No problem," he said, glancing out toward the sea. "The storm finally broke."
When I arrived at the Union Jack Liquor Store in the middle of downtown Kailua, Ackerman was waiting for me in a Datsun pickup full of grocery bags. "I got everything," he said. "You owe me three hundred and fifty-five dollars."
"Good God," I muttered. Then we went into the Union Jack and loaded up my VISA card with four cases of Heineken beer, two quarts each of Chivas Regal and Wild Turkey, two bottles of gin and a gallon of orange juice, along with six bottles of their best wines and another six bottles of champagne for the cocktail party that night.
The plan was for Ralph, my fiancée and The Family to meet us at South Point around sunset for an elegant evening meal on the fantail of the Haere Marue. It would take us six hours to get there, at trolling speed, but it was only an hour by road -- so they could spend the afternoon at the City of Refuge and still get to South Point before we did. Captain Steve had arranged our meeting point -- a small beach in a cove at the southernmost tip of the island. He'd even arranged a radiotelephone contact through a friend of his who had a ranch near South Point.
"Don't worry," he told Ralph. "You can drive your car right down to the beach. And when you see the boat, just blow your horn and flash the headlights. We'll come in and pick you up."
For dinner. And cocktails. Then they would drive backt o the compound, while we spent the night on the boat and did our diving in the morning. After that, we would troll back up the coast and arrive at the Hanoahou around dusk for another cocktail party and a big fish dinner at home.
That was the plan. No problem at all. We would cruise down to South Point and have dinner on the fantail.
We left the Honokau not long after ten-thirty, poking carefully through a crust of smoking driftwood in the harbor. A boat had caught fire the night before and burned to the waterline. It was the Blue Pacific, Lee Marvin's old boat. There had been some kind of long dispute about ownership, Ackerman explained, and now the dispute was over.
"Jesus Christ," said Captain Steve as he eased his own boat through the dirty smoking debris. "They won't collect any insurance on that one. I can smell the kerosene from out here."
The two charter boats on either side of the Blue Pacific were being soaked down with hoses by potbellied Hawaiians aiming nozzles from the dock. They waved cheerfully as we idled out of the harbor. Captain Steve waved back and yelled something about the surf being up. The smoke in the harbor put a haze between us and the hot morning sun. As we passed the main channel buoy I looked back and saw the peaks of both Mauna Lea and Mauna Koa in the sky for the first time since I'd been there. The whole island is normally covered with a hamburger-shaped cloud for most of every day, but this morning of our departure for South Point was a rare exception.
I took it as a good omen, but I was wrong. By nightfall we would find ourselves locked in a death battle with the elements, wallowing helplessly in the worst surf I'd ever seen and half crazy with fear and strong chemicals.
We brought it on ourselves. No doubt about that. Ackerman knew it was crazy from the start -- and so, I suspect, did Captain Steve. I was the one who'd fallen for this lunatic scheme: right, we'll just make a six-hour run down the coast, then duck around a corner to some rumor of a protected cove and dive in a forest of black coral. No problem. Invite the whole family down for dinner. We'll just go in and pick them up on the beach. . .
We had both the Wall Street Journal and Soldier of Fortune on the boat. I had put them on my card at the Union Jack, but the run down to South Point was not calm enough for reading. We staggered around the boat like winos for most of the trip, keeping the boat headed due south against a crossing sea. The swell was coming strong out of the southwest. At one point we stopped to pick up a rotted life preserver with the words "Squire/Java" painted in the cork.
Captain Steve spent most of his time at the wheel high up on the flying bridge, while Ackerman and I stayed down in the cockpit smoking marijuana and waiting for the reels to go off.
I had long since got over the notion that just because we were fishing we were going to catch fish. The whole idea of trailing big-bore lines from the outriggers and rumbling along at trolling speed was absurd. The only way we were going to get any fish, I insisted, was by going over the side with scuba tanks and spear guns, to hunt them where they lived. Every once in a while either Ackerman or I would take a turn at the wheel, but never for very long. Captain Steve was convinced that we might hook a marlin or at least a big ahi at any moment, and he wanted to be at the controls when it happened. He spent most of the afternoon on the bridge, staring down at the barren, deep gray water through polarized fishing glasses.
Ackerman seemed to share my aggressive pessimism about the possibility of catching fish, but he kept a professional eye on the lines anyway. "I am the first mate," he explained, "and I have a certain professional pride." I had almost forgotten that he was a part of that tight little tribe of licensed charter captains that forms the only real elite on the Kona Coast. "We're all equal in the ocean," he explained. "That's surfer talk, but it makes a weird kind of sense."
I agreed. It was understood, in some way that has only to do with the sea, that either of us would be capable of getting the boat safely back into the harbor if Captain Steve, for some reason, could not.
Ackerman was obviously at home on the boat. He knew where everything went, and why, and not much was going to surprise him. I'd invited him to come along without giving it much thought, but only after hearing Steve say several times that they were "pretty close friends."
There were no fish. We trolled all the way down, but the only sig
ns of life we saw between Kailua and South Point was a school of porpoises and some birds. It was a long hot ride, and by mid-afternoon all three of us were jabbering drunk on beer.
It was just before sundown when we finally rounded the corner at South Point. The sea had been rough on the run down the Kona side of the island -- but it was nothing compared to what we encountered when we came around the point.
The sea was so high and wild that we could only gape at it. No words were necessary. We had found our own hurricane, and there was no place to hide from it.
At sundown I switched to gin and Ackerman broke out a small vial of white powder that he sniffed up his nose off the tip of a number 10 fish hook, then offered the vial to me.
"Be careful," he said. "It's not what you think."
I stared at the vial, examining the contents closely and bracing my feet on the deck as the boat suddenly tilted and went up on the hump of a swell.
"It's China White," he said, gripping the back of the fighting chair as we came down hard in the slough.
Jesus, I thought. I'm out here with junkies. The boat rolled again, throwing me off balance on the wet deck with a cup of gin in one hand and a vial of heroin in the other.
I dropped them both as I slid past Ackerman and grabbed the ladder to keep from going over the side.
Ackerman lunged for the vial with the speed of a young cobra and caught it on one bounce, but it was already wet and he stared at it balefully, then tossed it away in the sea. "What the hell," he said. "I never liked the stuff anyway."
I pulled myself over to the chair and sat down. "Me either," I said. "It's hard on the stomach."
He eyed me darkly for a moment and I planted both feet, not knowing what to expect. It is bad business to drop other people's heroin -- especially far out at sea with a storm coming up -- and I didn't know Ackerman that well. He was a big rangy bastard, with the long loose muscles of a swimmer, and his move on the bouncing vial had been impressively fast. I knew he could get me with the gaffing hook before I reached the ladder.
I resisted the urge to call Captain Steve. Were they both junkies? I wondered, still poised on the edge of the white naugahyde chair. What kind of anglers carry China White to work?
"It's a good drug for the ocean," Ackerman said, as if I'd been thinking out loud. "A lot of times it's the only way to keep from killing the clients."
I nodded, pondering the long night ahead. If the first mate routinely snorted smack at the cocktail hour, what was the captain into?
It occurred to me that I didn't really know either one of these people. They were strangers, and now I was trapped on a boat with them, twenty miles off the far western edge of America with the sun going down and deep black water all around us.
The land was out of sight now, lost in a desolate night fog. The sun went down and the Haere Marue rumbled on through the waves toward South Point, the terrible Land of Po. The red and green running lights on our bow were barely visible from the stern, barely thirty feet away. The night closed around us like smoke, cold and thick with the smell of our diesel exhaust fumes.
It was almost seven o'clock when the last red glow of the sun disappeared, leaving us to run blind and alone by the compass. We sat for a while on the stern, listening to the sea and the engines and the occasional dim crackling of voices on the shortwave radio up above the high-bridge, where Captain Steve was perched, like some kind of ancient mariner.
THE LAND OF PO
The sea was not getting any calmer as we approached our destination, a small beach at the foot of sheer black cliffs. Captain Steve took us in about halfway, then slowed to a crawl and came scrambling down the ladder. "I don't know about this," he said nervously. "The swell seems to be picking up."
Ackerman was staring at the beach, where huge breakers foamed.
The first alarm came from Captain Steve, up above, when he suddenly shut down the engines and came back down the ladder.
"Get ready," he said. "We're in for a long night." He stared nervously into the sea for a moment, then darted into the cabin and began hauling out life jackets.
"Forget it," said Ackerman. "Nothing can save us now. We may as well eat the mescaline." He cursed Captain Steve again. "This is your fault, you stupid little bastard. We'll all be dead before morning."
Captain Steve shrugged as he swallowed the pill. I ate mine and set about assembling the hibachi I'd bought that morning to cook our fresh fish dinner. Ackerman leaned back in his chair and opened a bottle of gin.
We spent the rest of the night raving at each other and wandering distractedly around the boat like rats cast adrift in a shoebox, scrambling around the edges and trying to keep away from each other. The casual teamwork of the sundown hours became a feverish division of labor, with each of us jealously tending our own sector.
I had the fire, Ackerman had the weather, and Captain Steve was in charge of the fishing operation. The hibachi was tilting dangerously back and forth in the cockpit behind the fighting chair, belching columns of flame and greasy smoke every time I hit it with another whack of kerosene. The importance of keeping the fire going had become paramount to everything else, despite the obvious and clearly suicidal danger. We had three hundred gallons of diesel fuel in the tanks down below, and any queer pitch of sea could have spilled flaming charcoal all over the cockpit and turned the whole boat into a fireball -- putting all three of us m the water, where we would be instantly picked up in the surf and dashed to death on the rocks.
No matter, I thought. We must keep the fire going. It had become a symbol of life, and I was not about to let it die down.
The others agreed. We had long since abandoned any idea of cooking anything for dinner -- and in fact we had thrown most of the food overboard by that time, thinking to use it for bait -- but we all understood that as long as the fire burned, we would survive. My appetite had died around sundown, and now I was covered with layers of cold mescaline sweat. Every once in a while a shudder I would race up my spine, causing my whole body to tremble. In these moments my conversation would suddenly collapse, without warning, and my voice would quaver hysterically for a few seconds while I tried to calm down.
"Jesus," I said to Captain Steve some time around midnight, "it's lucky you got rid of that cocaine. The last thing we need right now is some kind of crank."
He nodded wisely, still watching the flashlight in the water, then suddenly spun around in the chair and uttered a series of wild cries. His eyes were unnaturally bright and his lips seemed to flap as he spoke. "Oh yes!" he blurted. "Oh hell yes. That's the last thing we need!"
I backed away from him, not taking my eyes off his hands. Ackerman was nowhere in sight, but I could hear the staccato bleating of his voice from what seemed like a hundred miles away. He was up on the bow, pacing around with a gaffing hook in his hands, watching for shifts in the wind and screaming at the lights on the faraway cliff.
"You brainless Jap bastards!" he yelled. "Douse those goddamn lights!"
Captain Steve was now leaning over the back of the boat sinking another hot dog down on the end of our line with the flashlight. "What the hell is wrong with those Japs?" he muttered. "Are they trying to signal us in?"
"Yeah," I said. "It's an old Key West trick -- set up a false lighthouse and lure boats onto the rocks."
Suddenly he leaped back and shouted, "Oh my God, a sea snake!"
"What?"
"A sea snake!" he said, pointing down at the water. "Lethal poison, instant death! It came right up to my hand!"
I shrugged, firing another stream of kerosene into the hibachi and sending another balloon of yellow fire up into the night. I grabbed the bucket of water that I was keeping on the deck for emergencies. Captain Steve staggered sideways, shielding his face from the flames. "Be careful!" he shouted. "Leave that fire alone!"
"Don't worry," I said, "I know what I'm doing."
His hands were clawing nervously at his pockets. "Where is it?" he his
sed. "Did I give you the bottle?"
"What bottle?"
He fell sideways and grabbed the chair as another big wave picked us up. "The kind!" he screamed. "Who has the goddamn kind?"
I was hanging on to one tin leg of the hibachi, which had almost turned over. Finally, the wave passed and we settled back into the slough. "You fool," I said, "it's gone. You took it over the side."
"What are you talking about?" he screamed. "What side?"
I watched his eyes for a moment, then shook my head and went back into the cabin for a beer. Captain Steve had never tried mescaline before, and I could see that it was reaching his brain. It was obvious from the confusion in his eyes that he had no recollection at all of taking our last bottle of stimulant down with him, in the pocket of his trunks, when he'd gone down with the scuba tanks to secure our anchor line around a big rock on the bottom, about 90 feet down. I had grabbed the bottle away from him when he came up and drunk about half of the salty bitter mixture in one swallow. Ackerman, quickly understanding the nature of the tragedy, had drunk off the rest.
We had no choice. There is no point trying to save cocaine after you've mixed it up with salt water. Captain Steve had missed his share -- which was fair, I thought, and probably just as well. Any fool who will dive to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean with two grams of cocaine in his pocket is capable of anything at all; and now he was losing his grip to the psychedelics.
Bad business, I thought. It's time to collect the knives.
I woke up at sunrise to find Ackerman passed out like a dead animal from an overdose of Dramamine and Captain Steve wandering frantically around the cockpit, grappling with a tangle of ropes and saying over and over to himself, "Holy Jesus, man! Let's get out of here!"
I came awake and stumbled up from the cabin where I'd spent two hours sleeping on a cushion covered with fishhooks. We were still in the shadow of the cliffs and the morning wind was cold. The fire had gone out and our thermos bottle of coffee had cracked open sometime during the night. The deck was awash with a slimy mixture of kerosene and floating soot.