Fire in the Ocean Read online

  Keikilani and Jack exchanged glances. They appeared to be on the same page when it came to WestWind.

  Jack responded first. “It’s not that simple. First, that area is a national marine sanctuary for humpback whales. The wind farm will disturb the whales and affect their ability to breed and calve. Whales are sacred to the Hawai‘ian people, you know—we never hunted them. It’s an important area for the monk seals, too. Both the whales and the seals are endangered.”

  “Isn’t that sufficient reason to stop the project?” Clancy asked.

  “Nope. You have to understand, the power is intended for O‘ahu, and O‘ahu is where most of the people and all of the money are in this state,” Jack responded. “The political clout is all in Honolulu. But there’s more. Each tower—and there are at least 100 towers planned—is supported on three legs. Those legs have to be sunk in the bedrock, which will create a huge disruption of sea life.”

  “Last—and maybe this is selfish, but it’s important—we Moloka‘ians won’t benefit from it. They’re bringing in workers from other places, so we won’t get any benefit from the added employment, and none of the electricity generated from the wind farm will go to Moloka‘i. So we won’t even get a break on our electricity bills.”

  “Couldn’t you stop it?” Clancy asked.

  “We tried,” Keikilani responded gloomily. “You have no idea how corrupt politics are in this state.”

  “Well, who’s behind it?”

  “Ahi Moana. They’re located in Honolulu, but they have operations all over the world, or so I’m told,” Jack said. The conversation drifted back to tomorrow’s search. Auntie and Jack got into a mild argument about how many valleys on the north shore were accessible from the sea.

  The next morning Clancy appeared at the wharf before the sun was up. Polupolu was waiting for him. She did seem like a tubby little boat, but her seaworthiness could be judged by the years of hard work she had put in, evidenced by the many scars and patches scoring her sides. Sam Skinner, along with a young crewman named Mike, greeted Clancy, gave him a brief safety talk, and handed him a life jacket.

  “When I was out with the Coast Guard, I didn’t think they came close enough to shore,” said Clancy. “We wouldn’t have been able to see my friends if they had reached land—we were too far out. I found out that there are some small valleys in the cliffs on the north side, places where someone might come ashore safely. Can you get us close enough to check them out?”

  Sam nodded. “I’m sure I can get closer than the Coast Guard. But the water can get really rough, you know? And there are rocks and the reef to deal with. I’ll do my best, but no guarantees, okay?”

  That was as good as he was going to get, so Clancy nodded.

  Sam went up the ladder to the cockpit. Soon, Polupolu’s engines grumbled and sputtered to life, and they began to move into the channel. For the first part of the journey, Clancy relaxed and watched the shore slipping by. This part of Moloka‘i was well populated, and in the unlikely event that Sierra or Chaco washed up here, they would be discovered immediately. The sun lifted over the horizon, tinting the eastern sky with rose and gold; the fresh, salt breeze lifted his spirits and hopes. He saw dolphins and in the distance, the geyser-like spouts of whales. He didn’t go on full alert until the sea cliffs began to rise out of the ocean and the signs of habitation disappeared. Clancy held Jack’s binoculars to his eyes almost constantly after that point.

  Sam did bring Polupolu in closer than the Coast Guard had done. As he explained, he had been fishing these waters since he was a kid. But there were places where he pulled out because of rocks or too-shallow water. As they chugged slowly past the pali, Clancy did indeed see a few small valleys that they had missed on his first tour around the island. At one point, he saw a house perched above the crashing waves, at the foot of a tiny stream. There was no sign of a dock or of a road leading away from the house’s perilous perch above the sea. It was obvious from the neatly planted fields behind the house and the general state of tidiness and good repair that there were people living there. Clancy wondered how they managed to live in such an isolated place.

  There was one great consolation in seeing this lonely house—there were people here. If by some remote chance Sierra and Chaco made it this far, there were at least people who might be able to help them.

  Finally, they reached the Kalaupapa Peninsula, where Sam took Polupolu a bit further out and ratcheted up the motors. Kalaupapa might be one of the most isolated communities in the world, but it was a community. If his friends washed up here, there would be help for them. Past Kalaupapa, the pali was bare black rock, with no little valleys, only wild waves pounding against the sheer face of the cliffs. Polupolu’s motors revved, and the boat began to move briskly through the water. The day’s search was over.

  It was a subdued Clancy that disembarked at the wharf. He thanked Sam and Mike, confirming another search the following day. He trudged back to Auntie Keikilani’s home. Auntie met him at the front door, eyebrows raised in silent inquiry.

  “No luck.”

  She clucked sympathetically and stood aside to let him into the house. He went to his room and called Kaylee, figuring she had to be home from her conference by that time.

  This time, Kaylee answered her phone immediately. “Clancy! That you? Where you been keeping yourself?” He could picture her wide, happy smile, teeth gleaming white against her chocolaty-brown skin, and knew his next sentence would erase the happiness from her face like a wet rag over chalk marks.

  Clancy explained where he was—and why. There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Finally, Kaylee spoke.

  “I’m going to call Mama Labadie and Rose. Maybe we can help at this end. Mama could ask the loa what’s happened to them. I simply do not believe that Sierra and Chaco are anything but okay. I mean, Chaco’s an Avatar. He wouldn’t let anything happen to Sierra.”

  “Uh, Kaylee, I…”

  “I’ll call you back, Clancy. Gotta go.”

  Kaylee ended the call, and Clancy sat disconsolately on the side of his bed. In the beginning, Clancy had viewed Voudún with suspicion and disgust. Once he had gained a better understanding of Voudún, he was more understanding, if not accepting. “Voodoo” as depicted by Hollywood movies was his only exposure to this religion—witch doctors, Voodoo dolls, and zombies. In talking with Kaylee and Mama, he realized his error. Voudún appeared to focus on healing, but that didn’t make him comfortable with it, even when Mama Labadie’s pronouncements from the loa paid off time and again.

  Mama Labadie was a Voudún mambo, or priestess. This would have placed her beyond the pale as far as Clancy was concerned, except that Sierra was deeply attached to her. And Mama had admittedly been quite helpful in more than one crisis. She was a tall, willowy, black woman with fierce eyes who brooked no nonsense from anyone. She was also a loyal friend to Sierra, which Clancy viewed as her most redeeming characteristic.

  Rose was an entirely different kettle of weirdness. She was a Native American shaman. More mumbo-jumbo, in Clancy’s opinion, so it frustrated him that Rose’s insights were almost always right. Rose had trained Sierra to use certain powers that Rose claimed were available to anyone, but required constant development. That might be so—Clancy had seen Sierra’s powers in action—but he had been profoundly unsuccessful in detecting any such powers in himself.

  Auntie Keikilani came to the door of his bedroom. “I’m sorry you didn’t find your friends,” she said quietly. “Let’s go out to eat tonight. Maybe have a couple of cocktails. Listen to the music. You can’t do anything more tonight.”

  They walked to the Paddler’s Inn, a nearby restaurant that was a favorite with locals. It was a live music night, and the restaurant was crowded. Clancy did have a couple of drinks, although Keikilani declined. They listened to the music, and Clancy thought how soothing slack-key Hawai‘ian guitar music was. Several times, he found himself beginning to relax, but then he would remember, and his mood w
ould plummet again.

  They returned to the house. As he switched on the light in his room, his cell rang.

  “It’s me. Mama Labadie,” said a familiar, deep voice. “I talked to the loa tonight. They say Sierra and Chaco are alive.”

  Clancy wanted to believe, he really did. He was silent for a long moment, then asked, “Are you sure?”

  “The loa know. No mumbo-jumbo, like you call it. They were clear as a bell. For once.”

  Clancy was glad that Mama was several thousand miles away and couldn’t see his embarrassment. “Okay. It’s just hard for me…”

  “Yeah, I know it, but trust me on this. They say Sierra and Chaco are alive. By the way, I stopped by Sierra’s place to water the plants. Fred wasn’t there. You know where he’s at?”

  “Did the loa tell you anything about Fred?”

  Now it was Mama Labadie’s turn to be silent. Then she said, “No. Nuthin’ about Fred.”

  “Maybe he was invisible when you went into her house.”

  Mama snorted. “Even if he was invisible, there’d still be chocolate wrappers all over the place.”

  Chapter 8

  Roberts enjoyed being interviewed by the media. The young man now ensconced in his leather visitor’s chair was from Forbes Magazine. Roberts’ PR director, Alana Singh, deserved kudos for setting this one up.

  After Shelby brought in a coffee tray, complete with porcelain cups and saucers, Alana spoke. “Mr. Jacobs is writing a story on alternative energy firms, their strategies, how they will compete with fossil fuel companies, and the future of renewable energies. Ahi Moana has been selected as the representative wind power company, so of course, we’re very pleased to be included.”

  Roberts smiled and nodded. He’d been down this road before with the press, and it was familiar and comfortable territory.

  “Mr. Roberts,” Jacobs began, earning Roberts’ immediate approval for not using his first name, “Could you tell me a bit about your background? I’ve read your bio, of course, but I’d like to get a little deeper. You grew up in Pennsylvania?”

  “That’s right. A little town called Nanticoke, near Wilkes-Barre.”

  “What did your parents do?”

  “My father was a coal miner. My mother was a housewife, but she did laundry and ironing to bring in extra cash.”

  “So they were poor?”

  “Poor as church mice.” Roberts began to warm up, as he usually did when talking about his origins. “Of course, everyone thought when I graduated high school I would go into the mines, like everyone else. But I watched Dad come home night after night, covered in coal dust and exhausted. I saw a lot of folks die of black lung. Of course, they were also almost all smokers, and that didn’t help. Every morning, you could hear the coughing all over Nanticoke. Like living in a TB ward some days.”

  “Did your father get black lung?”

  “Died of it. But two good things came out of all this for me. First, I decided that there was no way in hell I was going into the mines. I wasn’t afraid of hard work, but I hated the coal, the dirt, and the dust, and I was terrified of black lung. So I decided to get myself out of Nanticoke, go someplace where there were no coal mines.

  “The other big thing was when I got interested in alternative energies. I decided that somehow I had to go to college. Nobody in my family had ever been to college before. They really didn’t see why I had to go, and there wasn’t the money for it in any case.”

  “Then how did you do it?”

  “I worked from the time I was old enough to pick up a broom. I washed cars, swept floors, minded the cash registers in stores, ran errands—whatever I could pick up. And I studied like a fiend. Being good in school wasn’t a huge priority for a lot of kids in Nanticoke, but I didn’t care. I was too busy working to have a lot of friends anyhow…”

  He could tell this story in his sleep. It was a good story—the poor boy bootstrapping his way to CEO of an international alternative energy corporation. But as always, there was a lot he didn’t say. He didn’t talk about his father staggering home blind drunk to beat him and his mother as they tried to shelter the younger kids. He didn’t mention the bullying he suffered as the town’s prize student, the dude who was always too busy studying or working to play sports or hang out. In particular, he did not mention the times he had been cornered in the school bathroom and beaten bloody because “the little shit acts like he’s better than us.” His chosen path was lonely, humiliating, and frequently painful, but each beating only set his resolve more firmly to get away and stay away.

  After graduating and working in a lucrative engineering position for several years, he went back to Nanticoke only once, right before he moved to Honolulu to join Ahi Moana. He drove his Lamborghini, a low, panther-like machine that hugged the road, and he wore his best Italian silk business suit. He wanted to visit his mother and those siblings who had remained in town, but in his heart of hearts, he was hoping to impress some of the gorillas who had terrorized him in his youth. The morning after his arrival he emerged from his childhood home to find the Lamborghini covered in smashed raw eggs and flour. Farewell to Nanticoke.

  As the interview progressed, Roberts assured that it all went just as he intended. It was a familiar process. Jacobs departed with respectful thanks. Later, Roberts praised Alana’s achievement in setting up the interview and gave her a well-deserved raise.

  • • •

  That first day, Kama insisted that Sierra soak her wounds in seawater three times. While she did this, Kama bathed Chaco’s wounds with salt water as well, filling gourds and taking them to the hale where Chaco lay unconscious the entire day. While she bathed in the saltwater pool, Sierra scanned the ocean for ships. Or boats. Or jet skis—anything that might take her and Chaco back to civilization. She also walked the small beach, obsessively searching the waves and rocks for a small green figure that never appeared.

  Neither she nor Chaco showed any sign of infection, but she was nervous about having no recourse to antibiotics. She knew from personal experience that scrapes and cuts from beach rocks were quick to fester. And Chaco’s continued state of unconsciousness worried her desperately. Kama seemed like a nice guy and all, but she had little faith in his doctoring skills.

  In the early evening, Kama roasted fish and served it with a seaweed concoction that also contained some peculiar looking orange and black ovals. Sierra, sitting near the open fire in front of the hale, took her portion and prodded at it tentatively. Kama dug in with relish.

  “Kama, do you mind telling me what these things are?”

  “‘Opihi,” Kama said through a mouthful of the same. With her new and mysterious acquisition of the Hawai‘ian language, Sierra had no difficulty understanding that these were limpets.

  “Oh. Okay,” she said, and took a gingerly bite. They were rubbery and salty, but Kama had evidently added additional ingredients, and the flavor was quite good. They ate in silence for a while.

  When they had finished, Sierra asked, “So, do you ever get any visitors here? There must be boats from time to time.”

  “No.”

  “Oh. I just thought that some time or other, people must be fishing out there or exploring, and this is such a pretty little valley, you would think people would come in for a closer look.”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  Frustrated, Sierra got up. There were no dishes to wash; everything had been served on broad tī leaves. These were tossed into the fire. The sun was just beginning to set, and she wanted to check on Chaco while the light was still good.

  She entered the hale. It was dim inside, but there was enough light from the doorway to see Chaco’s still form on the sleeping mats. She knelt beside him and peered into his face. His head was still wrapped in tī leaves, as were his scrapes and cuts. Despite her concerns, Kama seemed to be taking good care of his patient. Chaco’s face was still somewhat pale beneath his brown skin, but he had no fever, his brea
thing was easy, and his pulse—so far as Sierra’s first aid training could tell—was good. To her amusement, he was snoring slightly.

  Kama came in and stood over them. “He’s doing okay. Should be up and around soon.”

  “How can you tell?”

  Kama smiled at her, displaying large, even teeth that gleamed even in the dim light of the hale. “Excuse me for a few minutes. If you’d sit over there,” he gestured toward Sierra’s sleeping mat. “I have a few things I need to do for him.”

  Sierra moved over to her mat and sat down cross-legged to watch, tucking her thick kapa cloth around her more securely. Kama went to a basket and pulled out a length of pure white kapa. He took this to Chaco and wound the kapa around Chaco’s head, binding it crosswise. He began to chant in Hawai‘ian, but Sierra understood the chant as:

  “Kapo is dwelling in the beautiful growth

  Standing at Ma‘ohe-laia

  ‘Ohai trees standing on Mauna-loa

  Kauana-‘ula celebrated gives aloha,

  Here is what is red, a sacrifice,

  A sacrifice, a gift by me to you.”[1]

  Kama flipped the kapa cloth from around Chaco’s head, then looked down at him and frowned. He remained in this pose so long that Sierra became alarmed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Kama shook his head. “There should be an ‘aumakua sitting on his chest by now, giving me further instructions.”

  “A what?”

  “‘Aumakua. His personal god, or his family’s personal god. But there’s nothing there. I don’t know what to do now.”

  Sierra considered this. Another woman might have run screaming out of the hale, but she had more personal experience with gods than most. “Chaco’s not Hawai‘ian, you know. Maybe that’s why?”

  Kama shook his head. “Everyone’s got an ‘aumakua. They might not know it, but they’ve got one. If his ‘aumakua isn’t here to help him, I fear for his life.”