The Islands at the End of the World (19 page)

But I pause.

This is someone else’s boat. Someone nearby. They have their own plans for it. They’ve made preparations.
What if they’re trying to escape from
O`ahu
, too, and they’ve spent days gathering the gasoline?

“Lei, now!”

“Maybe we can all go together.”

Dad stiffens and leaps back onto the deck, squeezes me tightly against his left shoulder and faces the trees. I freeze. A thirty-ish haole man watches us from the shadows of the trees on the far side of the dock. He steps forward hesitantly, eyes on the gun on Dad’s hip.

I flashback to the boat thief’s head exploding against the white sail.

“What’re you doin’?” He’s muscular and tall. He runs a hand over the top of his sunburnt head. His T-shirt says

“Volcom Pipe Pro.”

Oh, man … he’s just a surfer
.

“Get away from my boat, will ya?”

“We need to go to Moloka`i,” Dad says, a tremble in his voice. “We’ve been trying to leave here for three weeks.”

“Will you take us?” I ask. Dad shakes me, but I don’t care. “No one wants to steal your boat. Will you take us? We have food. We have iodide pills to stop the radiation. We’ll help you find more gas when we get there.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” The guy takes another step closer. “I’m getting goddamned sick and tired of this. Can’t come ashore without someone begging for help. Get away from my boat. Grab your stuff and move along.”

Dad pulls the pistol from his hip. I can feel his quickened breathing. The gun wavers in his outstretched hand. The man hops backward and then steadies himself. He puts his hands up and smiles thinly. “Hey, come on, man. Don’t do this. Your daughter …”

“Dad,” I say.

“Shut up!” Dad shouts. The gun shakes at the end of his stiff arm. We fall silent. “Now, you can take us to Moloka`i, and then keep your boat. We’ll pay you in iodide. Or we’ll just take it. Up to you.”

“I don’t want this to end badly any more than you do, man. Just chillax, okay?” He’s slowly advancing. “Is there … is there radiation? Where’d you hear that?”

“Stop right there.” The surfer doesn’t listen. Dad raises the gun skyward and clicks the trigger. Nothing. The man rushes to tackle Dad. But Dad pushes the safety off with his thumb and pulls the trigger lower. A thunderous crack pounds against my ears. The bullet fires high over the surfer’s head. He stumbles backward. “Jesus Christ! All right.”

He looks behind him and glances at the boat, deliberating. “I’ll take you. Don’t screw with me, though; I need this boat. Okay?”

“We just want to get off O`ahu.” Dad unwraps his hand from around me and wipes his brow. “I promise. Now, we’re going to get in the boat. Don’t try anything like that again, okay? Once we’re in, you can come on board.”

“It took three days to siphon all this gas.”

“You can sit up front,” Dad continues. “I’ll drive. I’ll have the gun trained on you all day.”

“No worries, man. You win, all right?” The man stays back, glances nervously behind himself into the trees, and stands with his arms upraised.

My ears are ringing fiercely. I had no idea how loud a gun
is. Dad directs me onto the boat, keeping an eye on both of us. “Stay at the back,” he says. I crouch in the boat and drop my backpack.

Dad steps into the boat and takes the console, his eyes on the surfer. He still has a shaky grip on the gun as he uses the other hand to flip the motor from neutral into reverse. The boat’s rear pulls away from the dock, and Dad steadies his free hand on the steering wheel. “Now jump onto the nose if you’re coming, and untie us.”

The stranger carefully walks forward, hops on, and turns his back to us, glancing at the trees, stalling.

“Now!” Dad cries.

The surfer loosens the rope from the pier and starts to pull it in.

Another man emerges from the trees with a heavy red gasoline tank. He drops it and reaches for his own pistol.

“Dad! Gun!” I shout.

The surfer yells, “Hurry!” and turns, rising, about to fling himself at Dad.

Dad ducks, punches the throttle downward. We’re in reverse, and the surfer falls backward into the water. Gunfire echoes in my ears. I have no idea where it’s coming from.

A bullet hole materializes next to my foot, and I yelp. Dad flips the throttle all the way forward. The boat slams to a halt, churning the water behind me white, and then accelerates forward. I grab on to a compartment to keep from tumbling out.

The gunfire continues. Dad crouches low but never lets
go of the wheel. He reaches across his body and fires blindly at the shore. I glance back as we race away. The gunfire pops continue, and I stare dumbly at the man on the shore with his arm outstretched, too confused to realize that he’s firing directly at us.

The canal is straight and narrow. We race down the center. Dad slows only when a sharp bend approaches. He takes the turn and then pushes the throttle forward again.

My heart stops. There’s a wet stain spreading outward from a small tear in the back of his shirt.

“Dad, you’ve been shot!” I cry.

“Lei, sit down!” he shouts. “Sit down.”

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” I whimper, hands to my mouth.

“I’m okay. I’m not shot.” Dad glances back at me. “You’re spooked, that’s all.”

I shake my head. The back of his shirt near the right shoulder has grown a dark, tear-shaped stain.

We come to the fork in the canal. Dad turns left and speeds up. Soon we fly under a road, past Kailua’s formerly famous white-sand beach, and out into the bay. Dad cranks the throttle and we scream away from shore.

Ten minutes later he slows the boat to a crawl on the open ocean and checks the back of his right shoulder with his left hand. His fingers come away red.

He half smiles, stunned. “I’m shot.”

I can’t believe this is happening. No. Take it back!

“You’re right.” He looks around, as if checking the rest
of his body for holes. “Are you okay? Are you hit?” His voice rises.

I shake my head, but then I check. “No, nothing. Dad … is it bad? We need to get you to the hospital.”

Dad shakes his head. “We’re not going back. We’re finally out.”

“Dad! Don’t be stupid.” His image grows blurry as my eyes well with tears.

“I’ll live. We’ll make it to Moloka`i.”

“Dad …”

“Lei, please,
sit down!
” He winces.

I plop down and run my hands through my hair. The waves are big, and the boat, crawling forward, rocks back and forth. “Is it still in there? Aren’t you going to get infected?”

Dad doesn’t answer. I wait for what feels like minutes. He’s deep in thought, at war with himself.

“Please, Dad.”

“There are no hospitals to run to, Lei!” he shouts. He sits down next to me. The boat rises over a giant wave and sinks down into the next rolling trough. “I don’t think I’m hit anywhere important. We have to gun it for Moloka`i, okay? See it, there?”

He points east, to a faded mound of land that looks farther away than thirty miles.

“If we gun it, we can be there in an hour and a half. Twenty miles an hour, give or take? Right? I’ll take it easy, okay? We’ll find help there.”

“Dad, the base is only ten minutes away. We know they’ll
have equipment.” My heart is pounding. He’ll say no. There’s nothing I can do.

He stands up, trying to hide a grimace, takes the wheel, pushes the throttle forward, and steers toward the distant break in the horizon.

“We could’ve gotten away if I had listened to you.”

“Look, we got away, Lei. We did it.” He pauses. “Your way would have been better.”

I search the boat. Empty, aside from the three gas tanks. No life jackets, no water, no first-aid kit. I don’t see any oars. Dad can’t swim now. And even if he could, he’s covered in blood, which would delight the sharks. If we don’t make it to land on our first attempt, we’ll be at the mercy of the tides and the currents. We could drift out to sea.

I approach Dad, try to examine his shoulder tenderly. His shirt is sticking to his skin.

He barks. “Ow. Please. Don’t touch.”

“I just want to try to stop the bleeding.”

“No. Not right now.”

Forty-five minutes crawl by, and though O`ahu has grown distant, Moloka`i doesn’t look any larger.

The waves are taller than our boat. I never could have guessed that the open ocean would be
this
powerful. I’m sure that every swell that rushes toward us will capsize us. The boat muscles through but sways alarmingly.

Moloka`i is far out of reach. “Twenty miles an hour? Maybe that’s what the current is doing
against
us.”

Dad is stiff at the wheel.

The motor sputters. Dad shuts the engine off and instructs me while I refill the gas. I do my best to pour a full canister into the tank. The rocking of the boat on the high swells makes me slop gas all over the motor. I lean my head away from the tank as the fumes engulf my face.

“Careful, hon; we can’t afford to lose any—”

“I know that!” I yell, panicky.

I take a deep breath.
Slow down
. Finally, I train myself to pour a little at a time, syncing my tipping with the rolling ocean.

Dad fires the motor back up. We cut through the enormous, choppy waves like an ox driver plowing a lava flow.

The motor dies again. I pour in the second red tank.

I’ve never been to Moloka`i. “What’s it like over there?” I ask above the wind and the roar of the motor.

“Not sure.”

I refill the motor. The last canister is only half full. Dad winces at this news. We veer northward and head due east as the nearest tip of Moloka`i approaches. It’s obvious that Dad’s hurting, and the strain of talking over the noise requires effort, but he explains, “If I didn’t have a hole in my shoulder, we might play this safer. But we’re going to shoot the moon.” He wants to situate us so that we’ll drift toward land and not away from it if the motor fails. He thinks we might be able to reach Kalaupapa, halfway along the northern coast of the island. That’s the famous refuge of Father Damien. It’s the nearest town that we can reach along the north shore. Kualapu`u is technically closer, but it’s perched a thousand feet up sheer cliffs.

Though we’re half a mile offshore, we’re finally alongside a new island. Finding help for Dad is no less urgent, but relief blankets my anxiety. Home feels nearer, the horrors of O`ahu distant.

The coastal cliffs rise ahead of us, and the ocean grows angry. My grip on the bench tightens as we pass our last obvious landing before the coast becomes a wall. We’re asking for too much. Dad knows; his left fist is clenched around the steering wheel.

With the low-lying shelf of Kalaupapa visible miles away, our motor dies. We have nothing more to feed it, and no way to steer the boat forward.

We drift toward the rocks at the base of the cliff face.

Why was I fooled into hoping?

I hear Dad stifle a moan of frustration or despair. He circles the boat, gripping his right shoulder, searches the cabinets, finds nothing new to help us. I watch hopelessly as he ducks over the port side of the boat and attempts to paddle with his good arm.

“Dad,” I plead, but it comes out as more of a gulp. He sits up and wipes the ocean spray away from his eyes—or is it tears?

“Lei, we can’t get there.”

Kalaupapa: I can see it. It’s within our grasp, maybe four miles away. But we’ll never reach it now.

A giant wave lifts our boat and carries us toward shore like a surfboard. I cry out in alarm. Dad stumbles over and wraps his good arm around me. We rebalance and brace for the next wave.

“Inflate the packs,” Dad says. “We may need to abandon ship.”

“The suitcases?”

“Forget them. That’s why we rearranged things. Hurry!”

I jump to work, watching the waves crash against the cliffs. The current is carrying us backward as the tide pushes us in. There’s no way around it: if we try to scramble to shore by leaping off the boat as we reach land, we’ll be crushed against the rocks for sure. We’re going to have to beat the boat to shore. If we can find high ground on the steep slope, crouched atop a boulder or tucked into some crevasse, maybe we can escape the onslaught.

Maybe we can walk a strip of land during low tide.

Dad’s shoulder oozes. Sharks … 
Stop
. No second-guessing. We will jump. No Dad heroically staying on the boat to keep sharks away from me. If we bail, we go hand in hand.

“Dad, can you swim?”

He hoists his inflated pack loosely up on his left shoulder. “We’re both strong swimmers, Lei. We’ll stick close, but if you can scramble onto a rock, do it. Don’t come for me. Don’t. I’ll make it. We’ll meet up as we can.”

I can hear what he’s actually saying, but even so, panic recedes. My senses focus. My mind clears of doubt. I see what we must do, and my muscles are ready to act, with or without my blessing.

We watch the wall grow nearer. Among the jagged rocks are occasional inlets clattering with tumbling stones. If it’s the only beach, we’ll take it.

“Lei, go!”

I look into Dad’s eyes. I see a bravery that sears itself into my knowledge of my father. The pain eats at him. He knows he can’t swim. The forces churning below will swallow him. He knows that we must jump. He wants to send me to safety.

“Go, Lei. Go! I’m right behind you.”

He won’t give up the act. I see the good-bye on his face. He hasn’t given up, but he knows that only a miracle will save him.

But this is the end of the world. God has run out of miracles.

I dive into my suitcase. The climbing rope springs out. “Lei, go! No TIME!”

I invent a slipknot, hand him the loop of my lasso. “Under your shoulders!”

He drops his pack. “Stubborn as your mother!”

I pass the loop through the shoulder straps of his inflated backpack and hand it to him. He slips it tenderly over his arms. The boat surges toward the cliffs. We will dash against a jagged outcropping within another wave or two.

I tie the rope around my waist, seize my inflated pack by a strap, bunch up the slack rope, hold it in one hand. “Swim with the current. We can make that cove.” I point with my chin. “Hold your pack. Kick. I’ll do the rest.”