Mahu Surfer (30 page)

Dario came back and sat down with us.

“How’s The Next Wave doing?” I asked him. “Still slow?”

“Dead. I took in about a thousand dollars today. After I pay for the merchandise, I’ve got just about enough left to keep the doors open. Fortunately most of my staff quit, so I don’t have much in the way of payroll.”

“The silver lining is that if this goes on much longer, the county commission will get nervous and want to jump start development up here. That puts Bishop’s Bluff in a good situation,” Ari said.

“If we can all hold out that long.” Dario took a long drink from his beer. “But enough about my troubles. So, Kimo, how are you enjoying this forced retirement of yours?”

“It’s not bad. I’ll have to get another job eventually, but it’s nice to go back to a time when all I had to worry about was the surf conditions.”

Of course that wasn’t true, but I was playing a part—a part I felt I had to keep playing even around an old friend like Dario. We kept on talking, and drinking. We ordered a pitcher, and it was gone much too quickly, so we ordered another. We talked about surfing, and the North Shore, both as it was when Dario and I were younger, and now. Ari told us a couple of stories about growing up in Minnesota, and then we started talking about what had caused us to leave home and come to the North Shore in the first place.

“I was so damn glad to leave the Big Island I think I’d have been happy on a pig farm,” Dario said.

“I forgot you came from the Big Island,” Ari said. “Whereabouts?”

“Kamuela. Also known as Waimea. The whole town’s pretty much run by the Parker Ranch. My dad was the real deal, a
paniolo
his whole life, just like his daddy and his granddaddy and his great-granddaddy before him.” He drank some more beer. “You can just bet how happy he was when I told him I wanted to be a surfer, not a paniolo.”

“Probably about as happy as my dad when I told him I was leaving Minnesota,” Ari said. They both looked at me.

“Sorry, my dad was a surfer when he was young, and I’m the baby, so my folks didn’t get too excited when I told them I wanted to surf. They just wanted me to wait until I finished college.”

Ari drained the last of the pitcher. “Another?” Dario and I nodded, and he signaled the waitress. “So tell us about growing up on the ranch,” he said to Dario. “You learn to ride horses, rope cattle, all that stuff?”

“You bet. I’m a rootin’ tootin’ dang cowboy all right.” He laughed. “It sounds pretty goofy to be a Hawaiian cowboy, but the Parker Ranch is the largest privately owned ranch in the country. Over 225,000 acres, over 50,000 head of cattle, a hundred paniolos to take care of it all.”

“Oh, those long, lonesome nights on the range,” Ari said. “Just you and the other cowboys. No womenfolk around for miles.”

“It wasn’t exactly a porn film,” Dario said dryly. “Most of the time you’re just too damn tired to think about anything besides curling up in a bedroll or a bunk house and getting some sleep.”

“Oh, come on, you must have a story to tell us,” I said.

“My life is not the stuff of your late-night fantasies,” Dario said.

“That’s right, you’re a married man,” Ari said.

It’s a good thing I didn’t have any beer in my glass, or I’d have choked on it. “Married?” I asked. “What’s his name?”

“Her name is Mary,” Dario said. The waitress delivered the new pitcher, and I poured a glass full and took a good long drink from it. “I like a little variety in my diet. So shoot me.”

“Don’t say that so loud,” Ari said. “Somebody’s likely to take you up on it.”

“Okay, Dario,” I said. “Explain to me how you got married. I’m dying to hear this one. It either has to involve parental pressure or a significant amount of alcohol.”

“Neither. Well, maybe a little of the first. I went home a couple of years ago and saw Mary. Her dad’s a paniolo, too, and I’ve known her all her life. She’s five years younger than I am, and she was just wasting away there in Kamuela, dying to get out. The only way for a girl to get out of there is to get married, so I married her and brought her over here.”

“But you don’t actually sleep with her,” I said.

“He has a child,” Ari said, and I could see the mischief dancing in his eyes.

“This is surreal.” I leaned in close to Ari. “He sucked my dick,” I said, and as I did I realized I was probably drunker than I had thought.

Ari laughed, a big guffaw that resounded around the room. “Mine, too,” he said, when he finally stopped laughing.

“I’m a bisexual,” Dario said, struggling to regain some dignity.

“You’re an omnisexual,” Ari said. “I’ve seen the way your dog runs away when you come in the house.”

I laughed, and Dario said, “That was uncalled for, Aristotle.”

“You must only fuck her from behind,” I said. “Can you pretend she’s a boy from that angle?”

“This conversation is on a vertical slide.” Dario drained his beer, then pulled out a few bills from his wallet and dropped them on the table. “Good night, gentlemen. And I use that term loosely.”

He got up and stalked out of the bar. “I guess I hurt his feelings,” I said. “But considering how much my tits hurt when he was done with them, I think we’re even.”

“Do tell.” Ari scooted his chair over closer to mine, and I told him the whole sorry story. A funny thing, though; the more time I spent on the North Shore, the more times I told that story, the less power it seemed to have over me. I guess that was a good thing.

We left a little while later, both of us trying to make sure the other was sober enough to drive. I made it back to Cane Landing without incident—the roads were almost completely deserted, so I probably couldn’t have hit another car if I’d tried.

I barely managed to punch in the security code and stumble to the bathroom, where I found a bottle of aspirin, and took a couple, along with several glasses of water. Then I collapsed into bed.

When I awoke in the morning, just as the sun was rising, I barely had a hangover, just a vague headache that I treated with more aspirin. The yards at Cane Landing were fresh with dew and the promise of a new day. I got dressed and drove down to the outrigger halau, to see if their Thursday morning practice was still on.

Rich Sarkissian

When I got down to Waimea Bay, I found Rich sitting on the ground fiddling with the
iako
of one of the canoes. The basic design of an outrigger is that it’s a long, narrow canoe with two wooden spars sticking off to one side. Those are the iakos. They are attached to a long narrow piece called the
ama
, which runs parallel to the body of the canoe and helps to stabilize it.

The lashing that held one iako to the ama seemed to have come undone. “Need a hand with that?” I asked.

“You know anything about it?” Rich asked. “Cause I sure don’t. Tepano’s the one who knows about maintaining the canoes, but he told me he was heading to Honolulu until things get better up here.”

“I helped build an outrigger when I was in high school,” I said, sitting down across from him. “Not anything fancy, and we had the teacher telling us what to do, but I think I still remember.”

I took over from Rich. “Are you a native Hawaiian?” Rich asked, as I tied the iako to the ama. It was tricky, and I had to remember how it all went together, something I’d promptly forgotten as soon as the project was finished.

“Part,” I said, trying to focus on what I was doing. “My father’s father was full Hawaiian, and his mother was haole. So that makes my dad fifty percent. My mom’s father was Japanese, and her mother was Hawaiian. So she’s half, too. That means my brothers and I end up at half too.  Which is really interesting only because in order to be recognized as a native Hawaiian, under state law, you have to be fifty percent.”

I finished tying the iako. “That should do,” I said. “How about you? What’s your ethnic breakdown? Your name’s what, Armenian?”

“Yup. All my grandparents came from Turkey, trying to get away from massacres. I grew up in this totally Armenian little town in New Jersey. Armenian church, all the old people speaking with funny accents. Almost every person in town had a name that ended in ian.”

“Must be weird for you to be here, where it’s such a melting pot.” We both stood up and started carrying the canoe toward the water.

“I think it’s cool. I hated everybody being the same back home.” He shrugged. “I guess that’s why I joined the army. To go someplace where people were different.”

“Well, you certainly found a place here where people are different. Although there aren’t a whole lot of people around at the moment.” I looked around; where there had been twenty people at the halau the first day I’d shown up, now it was just Rich and me.

“How come you haven’t gone back to Honolulu?” Rich asked me. “You’re not scared?”

I shrugged. “I used to be a cop. I’ve had people shoot at me before. I don’t particularly like it, but you have to get philosophical after a while or you freak out. When it’s my time to go, I’ll go. Until then, I have to get up every morning, get dressed, and get on with my life.”

We continued toward the water, stepping carefully on the sand. “How about you?” I asked. “How come you’re still here?”

“I’m the anti-surfer,” he said, with a little laugh. “If anybody’s killing off surfers, they aren’t going to aim for me.”

“You’re assuming they were all killed because they were surfers. It could be some other reason altogether, just a coincidence that they all surfed. And as a matter of fact, Brad Jacobson didn’t surf at all.”

“But he was with someone who did,” Rich said, as we lowered the canoe into the water. “You won’t catch me making that mistake.”

Melody showed up then, along with a couple of others, enough to fill one canoe. “This place is like a ghost town,” she said. “I never thought I’d see all the surfers chased away.”

“If it was up to me, I’d chase them all away,” Rich said, as we were pushing the canoe into the water.

“You don’t mean that,” Melody said, jumping into the front of the boat. “You were a surfer once yourself. You can’t hate surfers all that much.”

“Try me,” Rich said, and then we were all in the boat, paddling out past the breakers, and there was no more idle conversation. We did a couple of runs up and down the coast, parallel to the shore, and then we did a few in and outs, catching a wave and riding it back in, then paddling out and doing it all over.

It wasn’t surfing, but it was pretty close. Riding atop a wave like that, the coastline rushing in toward you, the spray in your face and the sun above you. If something happened to me, like Rich, and I couldn’t surf again, I’d definitely find myself in outriggers.

It was interesting, I thought, as I sat behind Rich and paddled, that I was starting to like him. Underneath the anti-surfer bluster was a real person.

Of course, I’ve learned that you can be a really nice person and still be a murderer, a rapist, an arsonist, or a child molester. But it always makes it harder for me to hate a suspect if I start to feel like he (or she) is a human being.

We paddled for a while, but without another canoe to race against there wasn’t a lot of fun in it. We did surf in on the waves a couple of times, and that was fun, but eventually we beached the canoe. Rich and I volunteered to carry it in and hose it down before putting it in the storage shed.

“So why do you hate surfers so much?” I asked, as he unfurled the hose.

“I used to surf.” He pointed to his leg. “Can’t any more. Everybody thinks that’s why I hate them.”

“But that’s not it.”

He shook his head. “You saw where I work. Mr. Clark’s property. I see the way the surfers treat the place. Like it’s theirs to destroy.”

I turned the spigot on, and Rich began spraying the canoe. I turned the canoe for him so we could get all the salt water off. “What do you mean?”

“If the surf’s up, surfers will drive right up on the beach, they’ll drag their boards across the sand, tear up the vegetation. They don’t care that it’s private property. All they care about is catching a wave. That’s not right.”