Authors: Mark Haskell Smith
Joseph had seen it happen before, but it was always to someone else. Now it was happening to him and his family, his
ohana.
So he was digging an
imu.
He couldn't think of any other way.
...
Joseph stopped digging. He stood up in the hole, now almost four feet deep, and cocked his ear. He heard the whine of an engine reversing down the dirt road, the crunch of tires, the soft putter of exhaust. He climbed out of the hole just as the rear of a plain white van appeared in the clearing. Joseph had to shout to keep the driver from backing into the fire. The van skidded to a stop and then lurched forward in quick little hops, as if stung by a bee.
Joseph directed the van next to his truck and watched as the dust settled and his cousin Wilson climbed out of the driver's seat. Wilson stood and stretched, blinking in the sunlight. He was a lot bigger than Joseph: strong, with a large barrel chest and huge bulging biceps ringed with tribal tattoos. Wilson's shaved head looked like it was planted on his shoulders, his neck disappearing in a mass of thick muscles bulging out at extreme angles like flying buttresses. He wore shorts and flip-flops, revealing legs that looked like smooth tree trunks, knotted with thick blue veins.
Wilson had turned down a chance to play defensive end for the University of Washington Huskies, preferring to go right into the police academy. But police work was tedious and he never made it onto the force, dropping out of the academy and settling into a life working for his father's company. Occasionally, Wilson would take a job as a bouncer at a local disco. He liked that job, enjoying the music, the girls, the free crank. He held the record for tourist tossing, having once flung a rowdy Japanese man over a parked car and into the middle of Kalakaua Avenue. He came back the next day and measured the distance
from the disco's door to the bloodstain still on the street. Twenty-four feet seven inches. Untouchable.
Joseph, his body slick with sweat, stepped forward and embraced his cousin.
“Cousin.”
“How's it?”
“Getting close.”
Wilson broke from the embrace and looked at the hole.
“Wow, brah. You almost done.”
“We might need some more rocks.”
Wilson checked the pile. “Looks like enough.”
“Did you bring any food? I'm starving.”
Wilson nodded. “No worries. Nana cooked us fried fish and rice.”
Joseph looked at the fire. “Let's put the rocks in and eat.”
...
As the rocks began to heat and smoke in the fire, Joseph and Wilson sat in the shade of a large banyan tree, eating from Tupperware containers of fried fish and rice.
Wilson spoke with his mouth full. “How long you think this gonna take?”
“All night.”
Wilson didn't like the sound of that. “All night?”
“Better to be on the safe side, don't you think?”
“Seems long.”
Joseph snapped at his cousin. “I don't want to be going back and starting over because we didn't give them the extra time, man. I don't like this as it is.”
Wilson shrugged. He generally let Joseph take the lead. Joseph was the smart one in the family, the ambitious one, the one who went to college. Unless it was one of Wilson's areas of expertiseâfootball, primarilyâhe deferred to his cousin.
“You da boss.”
Joseph stuffed a chopstick load of food in his mouth and exhaled. “Sorry. I'm just tired.”
“No worries. You da best cook in da family.”
Joseph looked over at the van parked next to his pickup at the edge of the thicket. “They in there?”
Wilson nodded. “Dey not goin' nowhere.”
Joseph nodded thoughtfully. For some reason, he looked up at the sky. He saw blue. Nothing else, not a cloud, not a bird, just a wash of vibrant color. He didn't know what he expected to see: God looking down on them? Not that he, or anyone in his family, was particularly religious. Occasionally his grandmother would make a
kakuai,
an offering to the gods. But that was usually associated with someone's marriage or the birth of a new great-grandchild. She never made a big deal out of it, once pitching an overripe banana out the kitchen window and saying it was a
kakuai
because they needed rain. No one else in the family even bothered to do that. Who has time for old myths and stories when you've got to go to work? But Joseph couldn't be persuaded to disregard the local beliefs. Why should he? As far as he knew, the world was full of
akuas.
Maybe there really was a volcano goddess, shark god, waterfall god. We got loads of gods and goddesses around here. It was the Christian God who was always causing all the problems, with his absolute decrees of good and evil, right and wrong. The Christian God just didn't understand that sometimesâwell, circumstances arise where good and evil
become relative terms. The local gods understood what Joseph and Wilson had to do. They approved. For some reason the Christian God always sided with the mainlanders: the haoles and butter-stinkers.
Wilson finished his food and let out a belch. “Da rocks look ready.”
...
They laid down a good four-inch layer of beach sand in the bottom of the hole. This helped insulate the ground and kept the heat from dispersing too quickly. Joseph chopped the banana stalks in half, soaked them briefly in water from a well near the abandoned outbuilding, and put a layer over the sand while Wilson pushed the white-hot rocks out of the fire toward the hole. Together they shoved them onto the banana stalks, steam bursting from the stalks the moment the hot rocks hit them, and then tossed another layer of wet banana stalks on top of them.
Now came the meat.
Joseph followed Wilson over to the van. Wilson opened the doors to reveal two large, naked, and very dead Caucasian men slumped in the back. There were nasty-looking wounds on their chests, the skin blackened and burned around the puckering bullet holes.
Joseph recoiled. “Fuck.”
“Dey not dat big. C'mon.”
“Do they have to be naked?”
“Wot difference?”
Joseph considered that. There was no difference. Nothing was going to make this any easier.
“You get the feet.”
They carried the first body, a thin, reedy guy with a bushy mustache and sandy hair, cut in a kind of seventies style with the hair coming halfway over his ears. Joseph thought the guy might've believed he looked like a bad-ass Texas Ranger type, but he really looked more like a car salesman. They lowered his body onto the hot rocks, and the skin instantly began to spit and sizzle. Joseph and Wilson both covered their noses.
Without a word, they went back and got the second body. This guy was big, almost as big as Wilson. Wilson let out a grunt as they hoisted him.
“Dis cat used steroids.”
“Why do you say that?”
“White guys don' get dis big.”
Like his partner, the big guy had a bushy mustache. Wilson didn't know what to make of that. Maybe they were in a cult.
Joseph and Wilson struggled with the second guy, eventually laying him next to the hole and rolling him in. A burst of steam rose out of the pit as soon as the body hit the hot rocks.
They quickly got to work finishing the
imu,
throwing wet banana stalks on top of the bodies and then rolling more white-hot rocks on top of that. These rocks they would keep replacing with other rocks from the fire, rotating them to keep the
imu
as hot as they could for the next ten or twelve hours.
Joseph walked to the shade of the banyan and collapsed in a heap. He was soaked through with sweat, red dirt sticking to his hair, his face, his arms and legs, his chest, and his back. His sweat had turned the dirt to mud; the sun was starting to bake it into clay. From a distance he looked like one of
the mud men of New Guinea: a ferocious clay-coated island warrior. A mud-caked cannibal.
Wilson walked to his van and pulled a couple of cold beers from a cooler in the front seat. He carried them back and handed one to Joseph without a word. Joseph gratefully took the beer, cracked it open, and felt the cold bitter taste wash the dust out of his throat.
The two cousins sat together in the shade, drinking their beer, watching the smoke rise up from the
imu
and drift in the wind.
...
Joseph had been dreaming. He'd dreamed he was on a raft at sea. In every direction there was no sign of land, no sign of another boat, nothing. Just big, blank vastness. It was a moonless night, or at least in the dream he didn't see anything as comforting and normal as the moon. The sky was clear and starless. The ocean rocked with malevolent swells, the dark waves churning with jellyfish,
pololia,
the water almost solid, like black glass, with sharp jagged edges.
The raft wasn't a Robinson Crusoe jobâit wasn't bamboo lashed together with vinesâit was one of those yellow rubber inflatable things that fishing boats and pleasure yachts keep for emergencies. Joseph bobbed up and down in the waves, unable to move, trapped in the marshmallowy rubber like a man drowning in a condom, a grubby prophylactic spinning and swirling as it's flushed down the toilet.
Joseph woke up and blinked. The sky was warming, the morning sun somewhere off to the east, just cresting over the sea. Birds flitted from branch to branch in the banyan tree
above him. Joseph didn't need a shrink to analyze his dream. He knew what it meant. Something bad was hiding under the black waves, something that was sucking him down, keeping him stuck in place. It was obviously an anxiety dream. But the jellyfish: What did that mean?
He cranked his head to one side and saw Wilson snoring on a blanket.
“Fuck.”
Joseph jumped up and moved quickly to the fire. It had been Wilson's turn to watch the
imu,
so Joseph was relieved to find it still hot, the rocks still cooking. Joseph took a stick and bent over the pit. He poked at some of the meat, watching as it fell away from the bone, white, steamy, and tender. Just the way a kalua pig is supposed to look. Alarmingly, his stomach let out a ferocious growl. Somehow, in the night, the horrible stench of burning hair and roasting flesh had turned intoâwell, it smelled like bacon.
Joseph shuddered and walked back over to his sleeping cousin. “Wake up.”
Wilson rolled, rubbed his eyes, and groaned. “What's it?”
“They're done.”
Wilson sat up. “You check?”
Joseph nodded. “Yeah.”
“How dey taste, brah?”
“Stop fucking around.”
Joseph turned, walked back to the van, and began pulling out long kitchen tongs and large metal pans. Wilson joined him.
“I need coffee. I no can fo' wake up.”
Joseph didn't respond; he just kept pulling out stuff, organizing the work that had to be done.
“Serious, brah.”
“I don't have any coffee.”
“Let's go into town, get somethin' fo' breakfast.”
“It's too dangerous.”
“Get somethin' to take out, den. Dere's gotta be someplace fo' grind near da freeway. I'll stay an' make work.”
Joseph thought about it. He realized Wilson was right. They'd probably be here another four or five hours; they'd need some food.
“All right.”
“Right on. Get me twoâno, threeâbreakfast san'wiches an' two extra-large coffees wit' milk an' sugar. I need lotsa sugar.”
Joseph brushed himself off and started to get into his truck.
“An' some fries. Fo' later.”
“Make sure they're all the way done.”
Wilson saluted as his cousin drove off, jouncing down the red dirt road.
...
Joseph headed back toward the sugarcane fields with several bags of takeout riding on the seat next to him. Even at this early hour he'd had to wait in a line of cars in the drive-thru as commuters grabbed their steaming sacks of the fried egg, pork sausage, mayonnaise, and molten-cheese sandwiches before taking the Kamehameha Highway to the H2, racing into Honolulu like it was the Indy 500.
A couple of papayas, picked up at a roadside stand, tumbled around on the floor. Joseph rolled his window down, letting the cool morning breeze blow in and carry the stench
of congealing grease out the window, across the ocean, and back to the mainland where it came from. He looked at the bags on the passenger seat. The paper was growing incrementally darker, wicking the grease from the bottom to the top of the bag. It reminded him of his youth.
He'd spent his childhood eating grease. Raised on the “plate lunch,” a deep-fried chunk of protein, a scoop of macaroni salad, and two scoops of rice, Joseph had gone through his adolescence and early adulthood constantly overweight. He hadn't been big enough or strong enough to use his weight as a defensive lineman like his cousin, so he spent much of his time sitting under a tree reading books, eating potato chips, and listening to Hawaiian pop singers like Israel Kamakawiwoâole.
In retrospect he realized it hadn't been so bad. Sure, he felt left out and lonely, but then he was the only person he knew who'd read Proust's body of work in one summer-long marathon. He didn't go to the prom or to the school football games; instead he would go to the library and, if he found an author he liked, he'd work his way through their collected works. Steinbeck, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain: He devoured them.
When he discovered pulp fiction, it got worse. The Hardy Boys led to Mickey Spillane, to Raymond Chandler, to Ross MacDonald, and on and on. He'd read a book a day, sometimes forgetting to sleep. Paperbacks rose like stalagmites next to his bed, reaching toward the ceiling, collapsing into heaps, collecting like snowdrifts in the corners of his room.
This sedentary lifestyle came crashing to a halt one day. Sitting in his underwear on an examining table at the ripe age of seventeen, weighing in at a robust 275 pounds, a well-worn
library copy of Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
in hand, Joseph heard the doctor tell him about the “Hawaiian diet.” It was based on one simple fact. The Polynesian body had developed for centuries subsisting on a diet of roasted fish, greens, fruits, and taro root. The introduction of oils, and in particular the hypersaturated fats used in fast foods, had caused a weight explosion among islanders because their bodies couldn't process the stuff. They just didn't have the chemistry.