This thing was no firecracker; it was a flat-out Bomb -- 2,490 bright red Chinese firecrackers packed into a 10-pound lump and nicely wrapped with a time-release fuse that makes the explosion seem to go on forever. Most firecrackers explode and die instantly, but this thing went off like God's own drumroll. . . and it kept going off, and it kept getting louder, until finally I got The Fear. The noise was too intense, and the fireball was getting bigger; the porch seemed to be coming apart in very slow motion, and I heard a scream from inside.
There were two of them in there, and the eerie pitch of that scream told me that one had already gone mad -- while the bomb was still happening -- and the thought of it filled me with horror. I was slumped on my knees in the driveway, so close to the edge of the fireball that I knew it would make me blind if I kept my eyes open -- but I couldn't close them; I was paralyzed with awe, by this terrible thing I had wrought.
This is not what I meant, I thought. Not what I meant at all. It was supposed to be a joke, a symbolic gesture of sorts. . . the time had come, I felt, to reestablish the ancient Hawaiian "Law of the Splintered Oar."
The Law of the Splintered Oar
At the time -- before Hawaii was unified -- a series of inter-island wars prevailed among rival chiefs. King Kamehameha I, himself, made a series of destructive and senseless raids upon peaceful coasts and people. In one of these raids, he attacked some fishermen, and in return, one man hit Kamehameha on the head with an Oar. The force was so great that a second blow would have been fatal. Later, when the fisherman was captured and brought before Kamehameha, he did not kill the man, but admitted that his own attack had been wrong, and that all such wanton attacks were wrong. As a result, the Law of the Splintered Oar came into being, providing protection for peaceful citizens from raids and senseless pillaging by rival chiefs.
The notion had come to me fast, as good notions will, and I immediately went to the phone. It was eleven o'clock on Christmas Eve, our fourteenth day on this foggy, surf-whipped rock, and life was getting tense. But nobody had lied to me for three or four hours and I was just into the second stage of trying to relax, when all of a sudden the drunken caretaker veered into some kind of sleazy rap about selling me a tin boat that he had stashed on a bay somewhere in Alaska, for $12,000 -- so I could fish in the ocean for herring and make $50,000 a day.
Once I had the boat (along with a "permit" -- another $60 up front) I could go out with the fleet and drop my net with the others. Right. And for the next three weeks we would stay awake twenty-four hours a day, ram-feeding each other with handfuls of speed and hauling constantly on the nets.
"We get a little crazy out there," he said, "but it's worth it. Fifty thousand dollars a day!"
I nodded and stared out to sea, feeling the bile rise. Jesus, I thought, these people have no shame. First the Kona Coast, and now a herring scam in Alaska. On Christmas Eve, for $12,000 cash. . .
I stood up suddenly. "Okay," I said. "The joke's over. It's time for the bomb."
"What?" he said, "you want a bomb?"
"I have a bomb," I said. "I have six goddamn bombs and a long white beard and these lies are driving me mad! Where's the phone?"
He pointed, and I dialed the first number that came into my head. It was Captain Steve, who had taken us out on his boat the day before and caught no fish. No fish at all -- which was not a surprise to me, but Ralph took it hard. They had strapped him into the fighting chair at dawn, facing backwards into our wake and a thick fog of diesel fumes; then they put a gigantic rod and reel in his lap and told him to hang on, because the bait he was trailing would be swallowed at any moment by a fish the size of a bull moose, which would then erupt from the deep like a missile and "take off across the top of the water at seventy miles an hour."
Ralph nodded solemnly as we tightened the straps. "Well, well," he said. "That's bloody fast, I'd say."
I laughed. "Don't worry, Ralph, it's all bullshit. We won't catch a fucking thing."
He smiled nervously. "That's a bloody fast fish," he muttered. "Seventy miles an hour on the surface? And you say it's the size of a bull?" He glanced down at the reel in his hand. "Do we have the proper equipment?"
"Damn right," said Captain Steve. "Just be sure to keep your hands off the reel when he takes off. That line will go out so fast that the reel will get hot enough to explode in your hands, like a bomb."
The fish never happened.
But the bomb did. It was nothing personal, but I felt it had to be done. . .
Ralph and his family had never been west of San Francisco and the only palm tree they'd ever seen was on the Universal lot in Hollywood. . . But now, as Christmas approached, they found themselves marooned in a wooden shack on the edge of some barren wave-whipped black rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with nobody speaking their language and estranged from even their closest friends.
The British are very sentimental about Christmas. They want the snow and the slush of England, diseased beggars ringing bells on every street corner, news of food riots on the telly, the familiar sickening chill of a stone home with no furnace and the family huddled cheerfully around a pot of burning coal on Christmas morning. They are not comfortable with the idea of Saint Nick coming in on a surfboard with a sack full of cockroaches and a TV Guide filled with nothing but incomprehensible American "football" games for the next two weeks.
Some days later Cook learned that the king of Hawaii, no less, had arrived at Kealakekua and was to visit him. James King was at this time stationed ashore in command of the encampment to ensure its security. He had had no troubles at all from the natives. The natives would sometimes sit on the wall watching the incomprehensible activities of Bayly and his assistants and the impressive activities of the carpenters with their wonderful tools that could work timber with such seeming ease and accuracy.
The escorting chiefs, dressed in elaborate cloaks and hats, began to sing as they approached the Resolution, chanting with great solemnity, and then standing up. As they came near, the reception party on board observed that the second canoe held also High Priest Koa, hunched and shaking as always, elaborately attired and surrounded by hideous busts made of basketwork. These were covered with multicolored feathers, the eyes represented by pearl oyster shell, the distorted mouths filled with the teeth of dogs.
The king himself remained seated when his canoe came alongside the gangway. He was dressed in a magnificent cloak and with an equally magnificent feather cap on his head. The chanting died, a voice called out. It was suddenly clear that the king had come out only to escort Cook to the shore, where the ceremonies were to take place, and would not again be coming on board.
Cook was pulled ashore in his pinnace, King had already turned out the marines' guard, who made their usual dishevelled and sloppy showing. The formal meeting was to take place in Bayly's largest tent, and the lieutenant observed carefully the king and his entourage as they approached from the shore. Flanking the king were his sons, and following behind a number of chiefs; the king's nephew Chief Kamehameha, a ferocious-looking individual with his long hair plastered all over with paste and powder; a particularly vigorous and important looking Chief Kalimu; another muscular individual, Chief Ku'a, and several more. A parade as formidable as it was bizarre.
King watched Cook waiting patiently for the ceremonies to begin, a weary expression on his face, towering above all these islanders in spite of his middle-aged stoop. Then the king stepped forward, standing erect and without assistance but shaking all over as badly as High Priest Koa.
It was not until this moment, when in turn the king tore off his cloak and put it around Cook's shoulders, and then lifted his hat and placed it on Cook's head, that he exposed his face for the first time. Like the high priest's, it was peeling and covered in sores, the eyes were red and watery, but the expression through the ravages of kava was happy and benign.
To the lieutenant's astonishment, the King of Hawaii was none other than the Terreeoboo they
had met off Maui: it was King Terreeoboo receiving the great god Lono himself.
Richard Hough
The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook
SOUTH POINT
We had been trying to take his boat out for almost a week, but the sea was so rough that there was no point in even leaving the harbor. "We could probably get out," he said, "but we'd never get back in."
After a week of bad drinking and brooding, Captain Steve finally came up with a plan. If it was true that the weather was really turned around, then logic decreed that the normally savage waters on the other side of the island would now be calm as a lake.
"No problem," he assured me. "It's South Point for us, Big Guy. Let's get the boat ready. . ."
Which we did. But the surf got worse, and after five or six more days of grim waiting, my brain began to go soft. We drove to the tops of volcanoes, we drank heavily, set off many bombs. . . More storms came, the bills mounted up, and the days dragged by like dead animals.
As New Year's Eve approached it was clear that we were going to have to do something desperate to get in the water. In lieu of diving, fishing or even swimming, Juan and I had been forced to take up golf, a game I hadn't played in twenty years -- not since the days when me and Bill Smith anchored the Male High School Golf Team back in Louisville and lost every match we played. We all have our winter dreams, and bad golf is one of mine. . . but it is not the kind of thing you want to have to resort to as a final retreat from the surf.
On the night before Juan was scheduled to fly back to his holding-pen in Colorado, we had a kind of final family send-off dinner for him at the Kona Inn. Captain Steve had called earlier that day to say that the swell was finally down enough so that we could probably risk getting out of the harbor tomorrow, but by this time nobody believed anything he said and the trip to South Point would need two days anyway. . . so even if it happened, we would have to do it alone.
Ralph was off the water completely and forever. His one trip on the boat had been such a nightmare that he had focused all his remaining energies to whatever could be found on the shore. His trip to the Volcano House had not yielded much, so now he was determined to confront both the ghost of Captain Cook and the legend of King Kamehameha at the same time. Ever since I'd told him that the official "Captain Cook Monument" on the wrong side of Kealakekua Bay was in fact a deeded piece of England on U.S. soil, he had made up his mind to go there and do whatever Englishmen do when they find some far corner of England to cling to on the edge of some foreign isle.
The access by sea was easy, but not in Kona weather; so he said he would take the whole family in by the land route, a tortuous five-mile hike down the cliffs from the highway. The walk down was not bad, but getting out was something else again. Anna and Sadie were ready to make the hike and worship at the only shrine they had.
It was a nasty trip, and I wanted no part of it. Captain Steve and I had seen it from his boat, the Haere Marue, on an earlier trip down the coast. The Cook monument was a small marble pillar like a miniature Washington Monument perched out on the edge of the black rocks. The U.S. government officially and formally gave this tiny piece of land to England, as a gesture of diplomatic gratitude for all that Captain Cook had done: he had given his life, in fact, to discover a pile of rocks in the middle of the Pacific that would later become the 50th state of the Union and our only real base in the Pacific.
The history of Hawaii is so fouled with greed, bungling, and dumb cowboy diplomacy, that the decadent gang ruling England at the time should have been hung by their heels like Mussolini for letting these islands go in exchange for a pillar of concrete. England might have controlled the whole Pacific for the next two hundred years, if the Earl of Sandwich hadn't been so deeply involved at the time with sponsoring King George III for membership in the Hellfire Club that he couldn't see anything beyond the end of his own gnarled organ. The Earl was into orgies that year, and the King was trying to cope with a nasty little insurrection called "The American Revolution." By the time Captain Cook hit the beach at Kealakekua Bay the British Army was mired down in Virginia at a place called Yorktown, the Earl of Sandwich -- the first Lord of the Admiralty and the patron for whom these islands were originally named -- was so busy running women in and out of the Hellfire Club that he barely had time to think about anything else.
Not even Sir Francis Dashwood, one of the most infamous degenerates ever to walk the streets of London or anywhere else, saw the need to take time out from his talks with Benjamin Franklin to consider the implications of the fact that his friend Sandwich had in fact discovered a place that might have allowed England to control the whole Pacific Ocean.
Kamehameha seems to have been early distinguished by enterprise, energy, decision of character, and unwearied perseverance in the accomplishment of his objects. Added to these, he possessed a vigorous constitution, and an unrivaled acquaintance with all the warlike games and athletic exercises of his country. To these qualities of mind and body he was probably indebted for the extensive power and protracted dominion which he exercised over the Sandwich Islands.
Kamehameha was undoubtedly a prince possessing shrewdness and great strength of character. During his reign, the knowledge of the people was much enlarged, and their comforts in some respects increased; their acquisition of iron tools facilitated many of their labors; the introduction of firearms changed their mode of warfare; and in many cases, cloth of European manufacture was substituted for that made of native bark. But these improvements appear to be rather the result of their intercourse with foreigners, than of any measures of their sovereign; though the encouragement he gave to all foreigners visiting the islands was, no doubt, advantageous in these respects.
He has been called the Alfred of the Hawaiians; but he appears rather to have been their Alexander, ambition and a desire of conquest having been his ruling passions during the greater part of his life, though toward its close avarice superseded them.
The Journal of William Ellis
The first person I saw when we walked into the Kona Inn that night was Ackerman. He was sitting at the Kona Inn bar with a sleazy-looking person in bell-bottom Levi's whom I recognized as a notorious dope lawyer from California, a man we'd met at one of the Marathon parties in Honolulu where he was passing out his business cards to everybody within reach and saying, "Hang on to this -- you'll need me sooner or later."
Jesus, I thought. These leeching bastards are everywhere. First they only smoked the stuff, then they started selling it, and now they're gnawing at the roots of the whole drug culture like a gang of wild moles. They will be standing like pillars of salt at all our doorways when the great bell rings.
One of the reasons I'd come to Hawaii was to get away from lawyers for a while, so I herded our party in the other direction and down to our table looking out on the seawall.
Ralph and Anna and Sadie were already there, and Ralph was raving drunk. As we approached the table, he looked up at Captain Steve and snarled: "You again! What lies are you selling tonight? More fish stories?"
Steve smiled nervously. "No, Ralph. No lies tonight. I've learned my lesson -- you're a bad man to lie to."
"Not like me," I said. "I'm easy. We're off to South Point tomorrow." I sat down at the table and lit a joint, which nobody seemed to notice. Ralph was staring at me with a look of shock and disgust on his face.
"I can't believe it," he muttered. "You're really going out on that silly boat again?"
I nodded. "That's right, Ralph. We finally figured it out -- if this side of the island is rough, then the other side must be calm." Captain Steve smiled and shrugged his shoulders, as if the logic spoke for itself.
"And South Point," I continued, "is the closest place we can get to the other side, that's where the weather breaks."
"You should come with us, Ralph," said Captain Steve. "It'll be calm as a lake down there, and it's a real mysterious place."
"It's the land of Po," I said. "A desolate
bottomless pit in the ocean, within sight of the cliffs on shore." I nodded wisely. "You've been looking for King Kam's burial place -- maybe South Point is it."
Ralph gave me the stink-eye, but said nothing. He had already fallen in love with King Kamehameha -- mainly on the basis of what little he knew about the "Law of the Splintered Oar" -- and he was convinced that our story lay somewhere in the ancient burial caves around the City of Refuge and Kealakekua Bay. In any case, it was not at sea. "There are no fish," he muttered once again, "not even on the menu. All they have tonight is some kind of frozen mush from Taiwan."
"Don't worry, Ralph," I said. "We'll have all the fresh fish we can eat when I get back from South Point. Once we get around the corner down there to some calm waters I will plunder this sea like no man has ever plundered it before."
My fiancée was giving me the stink-eye now. Juan was staring up at the ceiling fan and Captain Steve was grinning like it all made good sense.
Just then I felt a hand on my shoulder. "Hello, Doc," said a voice behind me. "I've been wondering where you were."
I swung quickly around in my chair to see Ackerman smiling down at me, and the arm he extended was still blue. I stood up and we shook hands, then I introduced him around the table. Nobody really cared. We had already met too many strange people, by Ralph's count, and it was clear that Steve already knew him. Laila eyed his blue arm and gave a curt nod, as if some odd and disturbing scent had wafted through the room.
I was glad to see Ackerman, and now that he'd shaken the dope lawyer I stood up and took him aside. We walked out to the lawn and I handed him the joint. "Hey," I said. "How'd you like to make a run down to South Point tomorrow?