The Islands at the End of the World (9 page)

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Talking about haoles and Hilo.”

I shrug.

“It’s not
that
bad, is it? I’ve never really felt it.”

I scoff.

“How badly are you bullied back there, Lei?”

I stare at him. He really doesn’t get it. It’s not his fault; I only talk to Grandpa about it. “Dad, why do you think all the other professors at the U send their kids to private school?” His answer is practiced. “They’re cop-outs. They have no faith in the public schools.…”

“Dad. It’s because their kids
beg
them. To get away from the bullies.”

“Ah.” Dad frowns. He’s quiet for a while, driving. “We’ll figure something out. Maybe talk to Grandpa about it.”

I roll my eyes.

“Be that as it may, back to the original point: we’ll be much better off at home than here. Mom and Kai and Grandpa are
fine
. And we’ll be back there before we know it, okay?”

“Yeah.” It’s home. That’s all that matters.

As we pass the junction with the road that heads over the mountains toward Kailua and the Marine Corps Base, I spy six army buses caravanning up the green slope like a great caterpillar assaulting the world’s biggest leaf. They’re the first vehicles I’ve seen that seem to have a purpose: to move people away from Honolulu, and fast.

Maybe we should be on one of those buses.

The Kalaeloa Airport is bursting at the seams; there’s nowhere to park. We’re sucked into a vortex of aimlessly circling traffic. Dad fumes. I stay quiet. All the parking lots have broken barrier arms at their entrances and exits, but there are security guards to stop traffic.

Finally, Dad double-parks along a maintenance alley a quarter of a mile away from the terminal. “Let’s go. Grab your stuff.”

“Wait, we’re just going to leave the car parked like this?”

“Yes.” He hands me a bag.

We enter the terminal with our bags draped around us. Dad muscles through the crowd and we wedge ourselves close enough to the counter to hear a clerk talking to the guy ahead of us.

“We’re already booked up through Tuesday morning.”

“Doesn’t matter. Put us down.”

“That’ll be three thousand. Cash.”

“What?”

“Each. That’s three thousand each.”

“Here,” the man says. He leans over the counter and passes the clerk a watch. The clerk inspects the watch closely. He jots down the man’s information. The customer now has a bright tan line on his wrist.

“Three thousand
each
?” I gasp.

Dad shakes his head. “Hey,” he shouts over to the clerk. “We’re trying to get to Hilo.”

“We don’t fly to the Big Island. Moloka`i’s the best we can do. We’re booked up through Tuesday. We’re charging—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Dad waves him off. “What do you mean you’re booked through Tuesday? There’s a half dozen choppers sitting on the pad right now!”

“Most of those have tungsten circuit boards. Fried. Besides, the military is restricting our airspace. It won’t be long before they commandeer our whole fleet and gut our molybdenum parts. Now, you have cash?”

Dad grimaces. The clerk turns to another couple.

“You should go to the Marine Corp Base,” someone sitting against the wall says to us. He’s also sporting a strong tan line on his wrist. “I hear they’re collecting folks for transport. You’re in much better shape than the people who want to get back to the mainland. A few of the army planes work; they’re always landing in Hilo. You could hitch a ride on a cargo flight and be home in time for dinner.”

I perk up, but Dad frowns. “And what’s your plan?”

“I’m booked on a flight to Kaua`i later this evening. I’ve been here for two days.”

Dad gives me a grave look. “I don’t like it, but he may be right. Maybe we should head over the mountain to Kāne`ohe.” The guy who was ahead of us in line overhears and moves closer. “No, no. Bad idea. I just escaped from there.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re not flying a damn soul anywhere. I’ve been trying to get to Maui since Tuesday morning. I left Honolulu International on the first army bus Wednesday night. And I waited, and waited. Meanwhile droves of tourists are filling up their gyms and soccer fields. If you think this place is a zoo …”

“They’re … they’re just shuffling people around?”

“It’s like a refugee camp over there. I wasn’t supposed to leave. No one is. I escaped.”

“What?” Dad says incredulously.

“If they’re trying to help, why are they limiting private copter travel?” the escapee asks. “Every day the Orchid hangs there, taunting us, the panic multiplies by ten. We all know this island’s in deep trouble. They’re just collecting homeless people to keep us from going apeshit. They didn’t even evacuate for the tsunami. The military’s interests are not ours. They couldn’t give a rat’s ass how long it takes you and your daughter to get to Hilo. The gas has stopped arriving, you know. What, you think they’re going to expend all the fuel that’s left to schlep around civilian families?”

Dad hangs his head, studying his shoes.

“I don’t know. Maybe transport flights will start. But I was there. If you want to be back home in a couple days, or weeks—not months—I suggest you stay the hell away from the military.”

Weeks? Months?
I ball my hands into fists around the duffel bags I’m carrying.

“Well, dammit, what else are we supposed to do?” Dad says.

The man shrugs. “You could always try one of the ferry companies.”

The Kaua`i-bound listener guffaws. Dad slouches. We’re all in on the bad joke: it’s been years since ferry companies ran between the islands. Environmental lawsuits and bad politics shut them down. And the water’s too rough.

The jokester pats Dad on the shoulder. “Hey, I’ve helped you all I can. That watch will have to get me and my wife out of here. Best damned investment I ever made. We may still be in the same boat as you, if the army siphons off private fuel. Same boat. Ha ha. Ain’t that the truth!” The man drifts away.

We stand and stare at the floor. There’s a lump in my throat threatening to burst free. I choke it down.

Home. I just want to be home
.

“Come on, Lei.” Dad elbows me. “This isn’t going to work.”

We return to the car with all of our belongings. Our rental’s almost boxed in to its parking spot. Dad jumps into the driver’s seat. “You okay?” he asks, wiping sweat off his brow.

“I’m fine. You?”

Dad turns on the car and cranks up the AC. He bounces
in his seat for a second and then pounds the steering wheel. “Dammit!” he shouts. “Son of a bitch!” He wipes his forehead and leans close to the air vent.

I don’t say anything. He shifts the car into drive and bangs out a ten-point exit. We leave the airport.

He turns the AC off and rolls down the windows. “
Everyone
wants to be voted off the island.”

“I’m really sorry,” I croak.

“No. Stop. That’s not what I meant. Hindsight’s always twenty-twenty, right? We would have been acting crazy if we had upped and fled a couple days ago. We may be crazy now. All of this may still end at any moment.”

And what?
I think.
We all just wake up and look around at each other and scratch our heads? We just agree to forget this ever happened? I wasn’t really robbing a grocery store at gunpoint. Can I have my Rolex back?

We drive in silence. On our way back into Honolulu, we pass by Pearl Harbor again. A battleship and an aircraft carrier creep toward the bay from the open ocean.

“Maybe they know what’s really happening,” I say. “They’re in contact with the mainland, and they’re just not telling anyone.”

“I can guarantee you that they have a good idea what’s
going
to happen.”

“I wonder if that carrier is coming from the mainland.”

“A little soon for that, maybe. They’re probably returning to port from somewhere here in the Pacific.” Dad is silent for a while, but then he says, “I doubt they know what’s
happened. It’s been five days. The panic is coming fast. If the government knew what this Emerald Orchid was about, they would have announced when things would be returning to normal, to keep everyone calm. If they knew things weren’t going to get better, they would have declared martial law by now.”

“What’s that?”

“When the military says, ‘We’re in charge now, folks! Fall in line! What’s that you say? You have
rights
? No, you don’t!’ ”

“Sounds like they’re already doing things their own way,” I point out.

“Ten percent of this island is armed forces. That guy who told us to stay away from there is totally right. He was an angel come from heaven. We just avoided a colossal mistake.”

My guess is that while all of these terrible scenarios
could
happen, the military is filled with normal people, in the end. People like Grandpa. They’re
Americans
, after all. They’re not going to be monsters.

Right?

We turn back into Waikīkī shaken. Silent. We’re going to see if anyone will take us to the Big Island on a yacht or sailboat.

It’s either that or take up paddling.

The Pacific Ocean builds so much force between Alaska and here. All that power grows and grows, pushed by strong winds, pulled by the moon, fed by currents, and then it hits these islands in the middle of nowhere. The only place that energy has to flow is between the islands. You don’t mess with that power unless you know what you’re doing.

Really strong athletes sometimes row from Moloka`i to O`ahu—Grandpa did it once, long before I was born. But the current’s in their favor. No one rows in the direction we need to go. Dad once said we’d need tons of training before attempting something like that.

We approach a park swarming with pedestrians, cyclists, and clogged traffic, prophets with placards commanding
Repent
, and large prayer circles. Police and National Guardsmen patrol. Makeshift canvas tents have been set up in every direction, offering medical care, palm readings, cash for gold, emergency kits, political flyers, dried ahi, poi. Three separate guys are selling toilet paper for five bucks a roll, and people are buying. One guy is even selling silk-screened T-shirts of the Emerald Orchid. Someone who was trying to sell guns out of the back of his truck has been pinned to the ground by guardsmen. He screams about his Second Amendment rights. The strumming of ukuleles and the sound of singing float from beneath several shady banyan trees.

A grizzly old man wearing a placard covered with scribbled biblical passages catches my gaze and shouts as he reads from the last pages of his Bible.

“ ‘When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come and see!” I looked, and there before me was a horse whose color was pale green! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind.’ ”

He drops the Bible to his side and holds a cross. “Repent, you forsaken! You sinners! It all comes to pass! The horsemen ride. Conquest, civil war, famine, death! The pale green horse rears up to trample you!”

I shrink away even though he’s on the other side of the street.

“Tune him out, Lei.” Dad squeezes my hand.

“What if he’s right, Dad?”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. The end of the world …”

“Really? Hon—”

I interrupt. “No, I’m serious. Why is this happening? Why would God let this happen?”

Dad believes in God, but he has no patience for organized religion. He wants us to meditate each night before dinner, but he doesn’t make us do it a certain way. I believe in God, but I’ve found sanctuary in the gods of Hawai`i. I pray and I learn the chants and I talk to them. Sometimes, on the wind and in the waves, He—
they
—will whisper back.

Dad twists in his seat. “Can I get back to you on that, Lei?”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. The truth is I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ll get back to you, okay? Promise.”

A thunderous crack startles me. I scream and jerk backward. The windshield on my side has shattered into a spider-web. Dad screeches to a halt. A large cinder block tumbles from the hood.

“Jesus,” Dad says. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. What the …?”

Something strikes the car from behind. We both turn. A second cinder block slides off the hatchback onto the street. I hear cackling and whoops of delight from above.

Someone’s bombarding us from the trees. “Dad, go!” I bark.

He punches the gas and our Civic peels away.

“What was that about?” My heart is pounding.

Dad races down the hill, turns a corner, parks along a curb. “I’ll take that as a lesson.” He jumps out of the car, opens the hatch, and rummages through his backpack. When he returns to the driver’s seat, his camping utility knife is open. I freeze in surprise.
What are you going to do to them
? But he uses the blade to scrape the two bar codes off either side of the windshield.

I get what he’s doing.

Every rental car in Hawai`i can be identified by white bar codes on the windshield. Tami is good at pointing them out each time we go surfing. If we were the wrong type of people, we could make a killing with all the cameras and wallets that we know are hidden below that towel cleverly placed in the footwell.

“You’re going to have to pay a fine for removing that.”

Dad peels back the last of the stickers. “They can have my Timex.” He folds up the knife and quickly drives away.

I can’t see anything out of the windshield now. The car is trashed. “This wouldn’t be another one of those ‘hindsight’ moments, would it?”

Dad laughs. “There’s nothing twenty-twenty about the state of this windshield.”

I clench my teeth.
So much for feeling welcome on O`ahu
.

Dad parks illegally along the seawall.

“Should I wait here?” I ask nervously.

“No. We stick close together.”

I jump out of the car. I reach for my pack, but Dad stops
me. “There’s too much. Let’s find a ride first,” he suggests. He stuffs our packs into the trunk with the rest of our bags, glancing around.