back like Kelia's. While not terribly bright, Hiilani held down a regular job. She wasn't a college girl or a streetwalker like some of the others. She was different from Kia and Linda from the university, who'd both ridden for free in his bus when he'd taken another driver's route for two weeks. They'd teased him about being a bus driver, because earlier in class, he'd bragged about working on a big ranch nearby, saying one day he'd become a lawyer or possibly a doctor. A simple check with the registrar might have told either girl that he was barely capable of paying for one class, let alone a full load, and that he was a failing part-timer at the university.
He had flirted with Kia Wailea, telling her all kinds of stories about himself, building himself up to her. She had seemed disinterested until he suddenly surprised her on the strip, where, after several nights of hunting for a new Kelia, he saw her taking on johns for money. It wasn't long before her friend Linda was doing the same. He saw them in broad daylight doing this; he saw it all from the big tinted windshield of his bus.
It was then that Lopaka began to steadily watch his two classmates to learn their routines. He knew from experience that everyone had a routine, that people walked through patterns of existence that dug ruts as deep as canals, and these two girls were no exception. He counseled himself to be patient, to present himself to the girls whenever and wherever possible as a harmless but interested fellow. He was careful not to pressure either of them, but at the same time to learn their likes. Linda, for instance, was a poetry lover and wanted to write poetry, so he located the only book of poetry he owned, an ancient relic left him by his mother, the only item he'd ever known that belonged to her, a book of Shakespeare's sonnets. It endeared him somewhat to Kia, and greatly to Linda, to give her his mother's book of poems. Some years before giving Linda the book, he'd read the sonnets himself, and he'd underlined passages that appealed to him. The underlined passages spoke to him and to her, the hunter and the hunted in intimate conversation, he thought. Surely, she must know to stay away from him after that, he thought. Meanwhile, he continued to hold an inordinate power over the girls, for he knew their daily routines as well as they. It was only a matter of time before he struck. At the exact right moment, he meant to intersect Kia's and Linda's pathways, so that their meeting by chance beamed brightly like a flash of fate, a surprising crisscross of serendipity, when in fact it was well timed and practiced.
Even when Kia, the more streetwise of the two, questioned that fate, and he confessed to following her, she found it romantic that he should go to such lengths. She teased at first, calling him a stalker, then laughing at her own joke, never really believing him capable of anything but total adoration and awe. Then, too late, she learned the truth of his hunt.
Not for the first time does he realize that the very anonymity of his job, and of the large city of Honolulu, makes success in his hunt possible. The fact he has no friends, no relatives any longer-for they have long since abandoned him-and the fact he is considered an introvert and an 'ae 'e, a wandering, shiftless, rootless, unstable soul, an awkward 'ano'e, and odd duck as the whites say, shying from crowds, parties, relatives, presenting a stiff arm to others-all of it aides in the hunt.
No one has willingly come to his bungalow since Kelia left years before.
Still Hiilani, he tells himself, is a high risk. She has close family ties from what he can tell, and already the island families are outraged about the disappearances of Kia and Linda. It may be safest to go elsewhere tonight in his hunt. He might just return to the Waikiki strip to meet for the fourth or fifth time that heavily made-up streetwalker named Terri, but there's something not quite right about her. There's no way she's a native, despite her dress and that horrid, long black wig she wears, but she does-in her costume-look something like Kelia, and if he were to ignore the fact Terri has no Polynesian blood whatsoever, he might imagine her to be another Kelia.
She could be a cop posing as a hooker, he fears. If not, she's obviously an American girl who's gone native. Terri is slender, petite-Kelia's size-pretty, willing enough if the price is right, but he wants her to come regardless of any transaction. He wants her to open herself to him, to make herself vulnerable to him the way Hiilani already has, the way Kia and Linda did. But there's a hard edge to this Terri that speaks of experience.
Linda was different. Lopaka had to lure and bait her over a longer period of time, and even when he did strike, she'd been weakened more by the sudden disappearance of her friend Kia than by him. She didn't particularly wish to go with him that night. While many others followed him like stray dogs to their deaths, Linda did not go so peaceably. She fought. She hurt and even scarred him. She was more like Kelia in that way than any of the others. So, he wonders now, which Kelia is it to be tonight? The streetwalker or the liquor-store clerk who likes to peek at the dirty magazines?
Either way, he will be doing the work of gods…
He often daydreams on his route, even as he tells the tourists what they want to hear; it is one of his few pleasures. His daydreams surround his killing fantasy. He re-invents the moment of attack, binding the limbs, attaching them to the rack he has built especially to hold Kelia helplessly against the wall, a rack like that used by his father against those who broke the law in the village. He relives those dark-time moments with Linda, with Kia, with all the Kelias he has sent over to Ku and in whose destruction he has found gleeful satisfaction, far beyond sexual fulfillment, he assures himself, for with each killing he comes one step closer to his own godhood.
Sometimes his daydreams become inextricably mixed with memories; memories he'd just as soon forget, reshape or counterfeit, memories of hurt and humiliation so intense they must be forged anew if any of it is to make sense. Yet it was in those early years-even as an infant, humiliation and all-that he was first contacted by the running-wind gods to become their servant. The trade winds rocked his cradle.
Remembrance is painful and he hides from it always, yet it finds him, creeps into his daydreams, slithers into his bed, catches him at the wheel and at his weakest moments. Since he is unable to fully escape, a black and inky depression pours over his soul, blotting all else out. Childhood: No matter how he tries, his huge father finds him. His father still wants him to one day become him, but Lopaka has decided on another fate, one offered by a higher power than his earthly father. He escaped his father's tyrannical domination, escaped the place of his birth, the backward life of his youth, when his father sent him away, ostensibly to gain a deep, abiding understanding of the world through a Western education.
His freedom won, he found himself venting his pent-up rage on the unsuspecting in his midst, first on Maui, until his marriage to Kelia when, for a time, he was in control of his primal urges. Still, his angry father, never understanding the depths to which Lopaka had sunk, was enraged on learning that his son had married without consent or traditional ceremony. His father not only cut off all funds for him, but all contact as well, banishing him from ever returning to his island home of Molokai. He had dared to marry below himself, to marry a mixed-blood at that, to take a noanoa, a common peasant, for a wife. Hypocritically, the old man, chief of his puny tribe, had taken in a white woman, living in sin, giving birth to Lopaka, but she had been, according to his royal father, a “high-born haole.”
As a boy of four, he had seen his twin brother die when the ministrations and incantations employed by his father failed miserably to save the boy from a disease that had spread across their homeland. Lopaka, like his deformed brother, Lopeko, was infected with the contagion and very nearly lost his own life at that time. Often now, as in the past, he wishes it had been him whom the gods had taken.
He saw his brother's body taken away by the woman his father would later take as his second wife. He felt the flames of the fire as the little body of his brother was placed upon a stack of others and bumed. He cried out that his brother was still alive, that he could feel the flames scalding his living flesh; Lopaka had the welts on his body to prove it, but no one listened; they assumed it was the fever talking. Lopeko's bones were cast into the sea for fear they would contaminate the burial ground.
Later, as he grew older, Lopaka began to see his father's cruelty, hidden as it was behind a veneer of civility, law and custom, yet clearly present. He also began to slowly realize that his father and he did not look at all alike, and that his father was desperate to have more sons, to replace the misbegotten one, the one without the 'ele'ele, the luminous black color of the Hawaiian eyes, but rather with pale blue eyes, so it was not long before Lopaka realized that he was an embarrassment to his father, a defilement. That while he was the son of the mokoi, he'd been conceived by a haole who'd brought death and disease to the people. Lopaka's mother, too, had succumbed to the devastating disease which she had brought to the village.
His father's attempts to have more children became common knowledge, and everyone in the village spoke behind Lopaka's back about the evil the white blood in him had brought to the village, and how the chief could not possibly pass on his powers to this pale son.
An outsider who never fit in, he became a misfit at an early age, keeping to himself, living an all-but-mute existence, hearing not the voices of loving parents each night, but falling asleep to the whispered curses of anger, disappointment and distrust coming out of his own father.
