Aloha's End (c) 2006 By Michael F. Zangari Chapter Eleven: Eyes As Empty As Pitted Black Olives

Chapter Eleven

The streets of Wai’kiki are crowded with people.
It’s a happy place.
Honeymooners and life long lovers mix their thoughts, connected in time by the same pulsations of then and now; with now and then. The time machine of the mind rides the firm tan legs and varicose veins like a roller coaster. Like an evolution chart on the internet, the monkey stands upright and becomes man and romantic perspective gets tipsy on the champagne of time. What does it mean to grow old? What does it mean to have been young?
The Hawaiian Steel Society is by the fountain playing slide guitar and lap steel. The ukulele beats like owl wings in the background with a steady double strum.
Eiiha!
A spontaneous hula breaks out.
At the end the woman pats her head and straightens her dress.
Hoy! Hoy! Pleasure-doll.
She is late for work, but drifting into warm tropical balm.
The sweat on her upper lip is as diffuse as near tears, the pre tear mist.
Her mu’u’m’mu is formal, but she wears it like a pu’va’o, a loose lava lava, a shear bark cloth below the belly button and over the Delta of Venus and down over the thighs.
The breasts beneath the business suit are naked.
She steps back into her heels and picks up her brief case.
There is something in the air this morning, something uncontrollable and wistful, something a little wild.
TrueWest feels it.
He’s dropped the Lone Ranger costume and is now into shorts and wild shirt and sandals. He’s got a pair of locally made sunglasses on, the deep gold of the lenses reflecting sunlight and flowers and crowd.
The ocean is on the left, a cool blue green to the horizon.
The catamarans are out already. The colored sails catch wind.
TrueWest studies the crumbled paper in his hands.
He scribbled details as Benny Aloha tattled on the route to the bean.
Not a known place.
He counts the alleys as he walks down the street. Five ABC stores later he stands at the mouth of an alleyway past a tattoo shop.
It is as dark down there as the sidewalk is light.
The brick disappears into shadows.
He looks for landmarks.
It’s there, just like Benny said, the graffiti on the alley wall underneath the window pane.
It is faded and hard to read, but his eyes are drawn to it immediately.
The words are neatly painted and outlined.
It says “Trade your beans for a magic cow.”
Benny said one of his artist friends painted it with a camel haired brush and good oils. That was in the mid sixties. He was busted for it, but they didn’t wash it off the wall.
He’s getting near to the coffee shop.
He can smell the beans and hear the thin, almost subliminal jazz coming from the alley.
He jackknife’s into the alley, picking up his pace.
At the end of the alley he takes a sharp corner.
He is stopped dead.
He is looking into a pair of eyes as empty as pitted black olives.
They’re set wide in a nasty, grimacing face.
He is close enough to kiss the big chapped lips that hang like leaches on the gnarled face.
It’s a wooden idol, a tiki.
It looks like the idol in the photographs his father cut from boxes of Hawaiian Host Chocolates. The Hawaiian owned company on the Big Island.
He recognized the tiki as the Hawaiian god Ku, even though it’s Ka’ne.
His family name comes from the God.
He comes from a long line of temple keepers, even if they had transplanted themselves in Texas to survive.
The cactus look like tiki.
His dad made sure he saw it.
“God is everywhere” his dad would say, “And the temples we protect now are in our hearts. It is blessings and curses. The tiki of the heart.”
“Weird” he thinks.
He is terrified and emotional.
It’s got his attention working. The jet lag splits and falls away.
He is completely awake.
TrueWest remembers the stories of his grandmother.
She’d come in to see him in the middle of the night and touch him on the shoulder.
She tells him in a thick pigeon English the storey. As she recounted it, her voice took on a rhythmic chant.
You could see the fire light in her eyes.
“You are Ku”.
She began.
Ku was not only his last name, but the name of the Hawaiian god of war, to whom many human sacrifices were made.
TrueWest understood this to be basic sympathetic magic at heart, that the sacrifice represented enemy dead. That many sacrifices symbolized many casualties in combat. Or something like that.
He never quite got the rota down.
The missionaries had burned the old gods in bonfires.
It was not, as his grandmother said, because of a lack of faith that Hawaiians helped. It was because of the sickness the missionaries had brought with them.
Hawaiian’s were basically healthy until the Christians came.
Then they got sick.
In order to get medicine they had to reject the Hawaiian gods and accept the Christian one.
They did, of course. At least they said they did.
They gathered up the idols and burned them.
“The idols are only the symbols” she said, inclining her eyes-brows, “not the god.”
But not everybody participated.
The Ku stood apart.
They hid the images of god in the forest so people would not forget what he looked like.
Like the god hidden on the chocolate box.
Many gods came to be represented by one god. The gods are in the god.
“So you see the chocolate god, you see the many gods that go into him. You see the sweetness of Lo’no, and the power of Ku.”
“When you eat the chocolate, remember.” She’d say.
Her chocolate colored skin, wrinkled and splotched contained the face of the gods to him.
Hawaiian tu’tu.
He looks the idol over.
It’s carved out of hard wood, probably a single log.
It has a dark stain and a clear patina. It’s been smoothed and waxed.
It looks old.
From what TrueWest can tell, it’s the basic Ku pose. The one pictured on the chocolate boxes.
He’s in the Ka’ne squat that roots to the earth.
It has the same awe struck and awful look on its face.
Like he can’t believe what he sees or his luck.
It’s a traditional temple carving except for the coffee cup that he is holding.
In the most general terms, Ku did not traditionally hold a coffee cup.
That’s been added.
It hangs near his cracked lips.
The cup has been glued on to look like Ku’s drinking from it.
It is bone china with a light blue Polynesian tattoo painted around the rim.
It hovers inches from Ku’s gnarled up and down turned mouth.
“Uncle Ku” says TrueWest to himself.
He looks around nervously for mystical apparitions.
“Be careful how you say the names of the gods” his grandmother warned.
His mother told him to pay attention to coincidences and patterns when he saw the Ku, or said the Ku’s name.
She’d always cross herself afterwards.
The chocolate boxes made her nervous.
“When you are on the island, everything is important. Everything is connected to everything else. You’ll see honey boy. The subtle energies interlace around you like a net.”
TrueWest listened to his ma with a half ear.
She was a crazy lady.
“The old gods speak to you in coincidence” she said, crossing herself again.
TrueWest nodded absently and looked at his watch.
“You will not be able to escape it. You are a single thread in a Rosetta of threads in much bigger pattern. You are Ku. You will be called to do your duty.”
TrueWest looked at her and said, “Ma, I’m a thread from a worn and frazzled sock” he said. “I am unraveling to reveal a toe. I need a vacation.”
She looked back at him.
She gave him one of her “pay attention to what I’m saying or I’ll lick you, eh?” looks.
You know the kind.
He listened to what she had to say.
“Everything that happens is important.”
More hocus pocus.
He is a Texas homeboy.
Yeah, with Hawaiian roots alright. Hell yes.
Not Mexican. Unless it got him an introduction to hermosa Linda
“I’m just going on vacation, Ma” he told her. “I’m not into discovering my roots right now.” He sighed. “I’m more interested in shaking my leaves and dropping my fruit.”
“It is no accident that you are going to Hawaii now” she said. “It’s your papa and mama’s faith” she said, tearing up. “We thought it would be easier for you if we forgot Hawaii and blended into the dust of the Texas panhandle.”
TrueWest thought of the ambiguousness of color.
He could be anyone in any crowd.
“It isn’t home, ma.” He said. “This is home.”
That made his mama cry.
“It was the only choice” his mother said.
“Hawaii is a much needed vacation on a fantasy island.” He said.
“I know I’m Hawaiian but I’m still going somewhere I’ve never been.”
“Hawaii is something else for a Ku” she said, hanging on to some thought in her head. She looked out the window at the sky. The land of the ranch went out to meet it.
“You never listen to me” she said. “Especially when I feel the spirit coming on. You are without spirit. A brown Ha’ole.”
He’s heard that one before.
“I listen ma” he whined. “You just don’t listen to me listening.”
His mother looked at him with skepticism.
“You are still a Ku” she said.
She laughed at her private joke.
“You Ku alright.”