Riptide

CHAPTER 30

Ho’oheno Li’a

To Cherish Li’a

“Auhea ‘oe e ka ipo pe’e poli,

Listen, lover with a hidden heart,

‘O ke anoano waili’ula.

Overpowering mirage.

A he lei mamo ‘oe no ke ahiahi

You are evening’s lei of saffron flowers

E ‘uhene ai me Li’a i ka uka

Exulting with Li’a, Goddess of desire, in the forest.

“Me ‘oe ka ‘ano ‘i pau ‘ole, v

“With you an unending desire,

A nei pu ‘uwai e ‘oni nei

Here in the beating heart

Mai ho ‘ohala i ka ‘ike lihi mai

Do not thrust away the glimpse

Pulupe ai maua i ka ua noe

Of our drenching in the misty rain.”

Jake Lassiter and Lila Summers spent the night — what was left of it — at Keaka’s campsite. Lila slipped out of her wet swimsuit, a one-piece yellow number, and dried off on a lauhala mat of woven leaves in the hale. Lassiter removed his trunks and put on one of Keaka’s loincloths.

Lila stifled a laugh. “You look good in that, Jake. It was Keaka’s favorite. He shot a wild goat for the skin.”

“If my partners could see me now, a deep-carpet lawyer in a goatskin jockstrap.”

They found some poi that Keaka had stored in gourds and mixed it with smoked fish. Lassiter started eating with his fingers. “Think you could make this stuff in Miami?” He knew what he was saying, sort of asking what she had planned for the rest of her life.

“Get me some taro, the Hawaiian staff of life,” she said, “and I’ll make poi till it’s coming out your ears.”

Jake Lassiter squatted on his haunches in the little hut and sliced several passion fruit, sucking at the tart jelly inside the skin. Lila studied him in the light of a kukui nut candle and said, “You’re starting to look like you belong here, Jake, like you fit in with the land and the sea.”

Now what did that mean, he wanted to ask but didn’t, that she was going to stay on Maui but that he could share her hale anytime? She had to know that now — after killing Keaka and with Mikala still around — she’d have to leave the island too. Lila slid back on the mat, making room for him, and then she patted a spot that must have had his name on it. She was sitting there in the flickering light, inviting him to partake of her after the poi but Jake Lassiter was strangely empty, devoid of desire. Lila cocked her head, studying him, her full mouth in its perpetual pout. She leaned back, bracing her arms on the ground, her breasts thrust forward. Her eyes glowed, and her cheeks were flushed.

“Maybe one of us should stay outside and keep watch,” he said, gesturing toward the door with the Uzi.

“Jake, we’re alone here, trust me.”

“What about Lee Hu?” he asked.

“It’ll take her till sunrise to get to Pukoo, if she can get out of the jungle at all. She’ll call Mikala, but he can’t get his helicopter in here so he’ll go after the boat he keeps at Maalaea Bay. By the time he gets there from his home upcountry, we’ll be long gone. When the sun comes up, we’ll take two of Keaka’s boards and get back to Maui. Until then…” Lila gestured again toward the mat, but Jake Lassiter shook his head. Still no fire in his loins, not on this night.

He crawled under the low door of the hale and walked to the fire, now just a cluster of hot coals. Strange that he wanted to be alone just then, strange that he was down. He had won, had survived. Sometimes after winning a trial, the battle over, depression would set in, too. Maybe that’s what life was all about, the conflicts full of fury yet joyful, the lulls a quiet despair.

It shouldn’t be that way, he decided, trying to will himself into better spirits. He had the girl. Why wasn’t he happy? What was wrong? Tubby’s dead, that’s one thing, he knew. He hadn’t thought about Tubby since he’d put the board in the water at Honokahua, had been too worried about his own hide. But it came back now.

Keaka was dead, too, hard to forget that, his twisted body pitched headfirst in the clearing only inches from the fire, the machete blade still jammed halfway through his skull, blood from his gut blackening the sand. Lila Summers had done the job, expertly and efficiently, with no wasted motion.

Or emotion.

Had done what he couldn’t do. Now she wanted to thrust and parry on the very mat where she and Keaka had made love to celebrate their triumphs over the haoles.

Lassiter’s mind was playing Ping-Pong with a moral dilemma. The body’s still warm and she’s got her replacement lined up. Not even a momentary pause for mourning her dead lover. The sight of the butchered carcass draining the old libido from me, maybe stirring hers up, Lassiter thought. He summoned a rationalization: She’s just different from me, nothing wrong with that. He ducked his head back into the hale. “I think I’ll sit outside for a while. Doubt I’ll be able to sleep after all this.”

“It’s okay, Jake. I understand. Tomorrow, though, IH demand your attention. And I want to tell you how wonderful you were out there, the way you threw Keaka off-balance, the way we worked together to defeat him.”

“Thanks, Lila, but you did it. You saved my life — twice today, by my calculations.”

“Someday you’ll return the favor.”

“I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary, that we could get away from the violence, get away from here.”

“What about the bonds, Jake?”

The bonds.

The bonds and the blonde.

He had forgotten half the reason for being there. What was it Keaka had said about the bonds? He tried to remember. “Where’s Keaka’s favorite place?” Lassiter asked.

“What?”

“On the beach, before you showed up, Keaka said the coupons were in his favorite place. What’d he mean?”

She looked puzzled. “Is that all he said?”

“I was a little groggy, but he said the bonds weren’t on Molokai. They were in his favorite place and you’d know the spot, something like that.”

“Keaka’s favorite place,” she repeated. “I don’t know. On Maui there are so many beautiful places.”

“But some place had to be special.”

She wrinkled her forehead and closed her eyes. “Maybe… the crater, Haleakala.” She thought about it for a moment. “Keaka never wanted to stay in the park cabins, that was the haole way. We used to spend the night outside, camping near the Pu’uo Maui cone. We’d dig a hole in the ash at the base of the cone and store our food and sleeping bags there. Then we could sneak in past the rangers anytime we wanted and camp under the stars. The coupons could be there, buried at the foot of Pu’uo Maui.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. But it’s a good guess, the best I can come up with.”

“We can go tomorrow.”

“Sure, Jake, but you can’t just carry a pick and shovel into the crater, the rangers would have a fit. We’ll hike in at the end of the day and camp out. We’ll dig after dark, take all night if we have to, and get out by sunrise.”

“Tomorrow night, then,” Lassiter said. “Now, shouldn’t we bury him?”

Her shrug was almost imperceptible. “If you want to,” she said evenly.

Together they dug a pit using an adz, a stone lashed to a timber they found inside the hale. Lila struggled to remove the machete from Keaka’s skull, placing one foot on the back of his neck for leverage. If she felt any sentiment, her face did not reveal it. Not a moment’s grief, not a second of reflection.

They tumbled the body into the pit, covering it with leaves and branches. No one offered a eulogy, but Lila looked down at the fresh grave, and said, “Keaka, wherever you are, I hope you’re as happy as I am.”

Back inside the hale, Lila stretched out on the mat and covered herself with a kapa blanket stitched from tree bark. Outside, animals screeched and cawed, and twigs snapped in the darkness. Lassiter watched Lila until she curled up and closed her eyes, and her breathing came in heavy, even breaths. It only took a minute or two, and there she was, purring awayher face peaceful and angelic. Lassiter crawled out the low door and sat, cross-legged by the shallow grave, listening to the music of the jungle, waiting for the dawn.

In the daylight, they easily found Keaka’s boards, the sails neatly folded, the booms tied to the masts. The crossing was easy. No whales and no Mikala, only problem a rising sun staring them hard in the face. When they came ashore on Maui, they left the rigs on the rocky beach and drove in Lila’s pickup to her girlfriend’s place in Kihei. Lassiter finally slept, napping at midday. Lila gathered what they would need: warm clothing, sleeping bags, shovels, flashlights, a thermos with coffee, a bag of papayas, and some sandwiches.

They drove upcountry in her pickup truck, through Pukalani and then higher in the Kula District, finally up Crater Road to the summit. They entered the Sliding Sands Trail, walking down from the observation area. The crater was filled with clouds, blowing in from Hanakauhi, the Maker of Mists, and they could barely see the bright red floor. Closer up, the rocks revealed other colors — yellow, lavender, silver, and black streaks, the remnants of ancient lava flows.

Coming down the trail, Lila had pointed through the clouds to the small rise she said was their destination. Later, on the floor of the crater, she gestured and said, “There’s our cone, Pu’uo Maui.”

Lassiter’s broad shoulders sagged. “But that’s a mountain. It didn’t look that big from above.”

“You get no sense of perspective from on top,” Lila said. “There’s nothing down here recognizable to compare to the cones, so they all look small. I’ll try to remember where Keaka and I camped. It was away from the trail so we couldn’t be seen.”

The cone was a miniature volcano itself, rising nine hundred feet from the floor of Haleakala, with an indented crater of its own on top. Lila was puzzled. “I remember there were bushes and pili grass nearby.”

They found an area on the far side of the cone with patches of ‘ ohelo berries. “It could be around here,” she said.

Could be, Lassiter thought, knowing it was futile. There was no way they could just jam a shovel into the red sand and come up with a million bucks. It was getting dark, and the temperature was dropping.

Lila kept looking for familiar landmarks. “Problem is, it’s constantly changing in here. Look at the ripples in the sand. New plants grow and die. Others are covered by the blowing sand. We used to camp anywhere we wanted and now looking around, the size of this place, I just don’t know. I’m sorry, Jake.”

“Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter.”

And it really didn’t. He wasn’t sad about the money. He thought about it and figured he didn’t care about the bonds after all. He’d really come for Lila, it had just been hard to admit on the way out here. After Tubby was killed, there had been another purpose, revenge, and with Keaka dead, it seemed like it should be over.

Darkness came quickly, and with it the mountain air grew cold. Then the sky lit up. The clouds disappeared and the stars blazed, thousands of them, more than he’d ever seen, sparkling against the black velvet sky, a king’s ransom in gemstones. They set up camp in the twinkling light, zipping their sleeping bags together, making a comfortable nest for two. The heavy sweaters came off and so did everything else.

They made love, the crisp night air outside, their bodies warm in the sleeping bag. And this time it was different. Maybe it was the place — the stars and the rocks that were born so long ago, a universal silence except for their own murmurs — maybe it was him, maybe it was a million things, but what did it matter, because Lila responded as she had not be fore, her breathing quickened, and then her breasts heaved and her body shuddered, then rested and shuddered again, and she gave out a short cry, and then another. They both lay there, bathed in each other’s sweat, and this time Jake Lassiter didn’t ask because he knew, and Lila opened her eyes and dewy tears ran down her sculpted cheeks and Lassiter kissed each salty drop.

Jake Lassiter looked toward the heavens, and in the clear, thin air, it seemed he could touch the stars. The entire world sparkled, the thousand-foot cinder cones etched in relief against the night, the flickering suns burning with fires of antiquity, the woman whose legs entwined his. If only this moment could be frozen for eternity like the bed of an ancient lava stream. Lila was his and he had only one goal: to get her out of Maui and home with him. To hell with the bonds, he thought, and he slept like a man with no enemies and a future as bright as the sky.