since leaving Oahu, and we know of your desecration of the burial site at the Spout.”
“ You're PKO?” asked Jessica.
“ Every Hawaiian is PKO. Some of them just don't know it yet,” replied Awai sternly.
“ Then you do know the chief here.”
“ That's right.”
“ And you wanted your cover protected, so you wanted to wait at the shrine, or were you simply going to turn back for your boat and disappear?”
“ All of the above, but it appears the chief wants to see me as well.”
“ I see your English has improved since we came ashore, too,” said Parry, his teeth now set in anger at the man. “You just better pray, white man.”
Jessica exploded at Awai even as she fought to keep on her feet, what with being shoved forward. “You harm an agent of the FBI and your little island paradise here'll be swarming with U.S. marshals and G-men. It'll make Waco, Texas, look like a backyard barbecue! Is that what you want, you… you native son of a-?”
“ You don't have no juice here, and your haole threats fall empty on Hawaiian soil, so shut up, white bitch.”
“ Do as he says, Jess. Hold onto your temper. We'll have to use our wits here, negotiate an agreement, some sort of amicable settlement so we can extradite Lopaka Kowona. That's all we're here for.”
“ I can just imagine what they'd like for a settlement. Especially Lopaka Kowona,” Jess replied in defeat.
“ Settlement, agreement, you haoles,” said Awai, shaking his head sadly. “You're trying to write up one treaty while you're trampling another.”
She countered, “You know why we're here! What kind of an animal we're tracking!”
“ The island is off-limits to U.S. military personnel, and the entire Caucasian race. That's what was granted us, this scrap of native land. You desecrate it without a thought, and you look for leniency from our chief?”
They were forced onward to march to the village. Parry leaned into her and said, “Don't worry, Jess. They're not so stupid as to harm us.”
“ Who even knows we're here, Jim? Anyone?”
Parry gritted his teeth and air seeped through them in a hiss. “Only Ivers, but Tony's smart. He'll figure it out.” Just then they smelled wood fires and the lingering cooking odors of the village, and in a moment flickering fireflies shown among the wall of green darkness before them, campfires.
Ben Awai brandished the cane cutter and Parry's. 38 over his head as he welcomed himself into camp ahead of the others, calling out his name repeatedly, “Awai, Awai!”
Ben was greeted by several of the children who'd come awake and wandered to the noise. Women, too, hung on Ben Awai until he shooed them off with their children in tow.
Jim and Jessica were pushed ahead, out of the dense foliage where they might have found safe hiding, a point from which to observe the village at a safe distance, spying to determine if Lopaka were actually there or not. But all those plans were dashed now, and they were forced to their knees in a neady carved clearing where traditional huts stood about the circle of a communal campfire.
Jessica felt her stomach chum, fearing the worst lay ahead of them, getting extremely annoyed at the same time with the short creep that kept poking her ribs with a war club.
She wondered if these people were f6r real or if they were like the survivalists she'd encountered on tf^e mainland, who were more obsessed with a lifestyle than committed to a way of life. The native population was crowded around them, obscuring her view, but she could hear the collective gasp that followed in the wake of Chief Kowona, who parted an Army-issue tarp acting as an entryway cover and came towards them, wearing a thick feathered headdress.
She felt Jim's hand grasp hers and tightly squeeze. “Let me do the talking. If you talk, he'll see it as a sign of weakness.”
“ Whose weakness?”
“ Mine.”
25
Once upon a time a man looked into the reverse side of a mirror and, not seeing his face and head, he became insane.
They were forced back on their feet and toward the center of the village, while the chief, acting as if they were not even present, performed a ceremony of dancing before the fire, which was brought to a fever pitch by the natives. But Jim suddenly stopped in his tracks beside her, and Jessica, following his eyes, stared across the fire and the compound to a ten-foot-high wood and bamboo rack that looked like an instrument which normally held fish and possibly goat meat stretched across it for drying in the sun.
A bloodied, mangled man with dark skin and Hawaiian features dangled from the rack, his hands and legs tied to bleeding with thick, native thongs. The man's wounds were man-made, the awful slashes creating a crisscross network of blood and flesh. Below him a Tire kept sending up cinders to rest in his wounds, and dogs sniffed about the dying man's feet, occasionally rising up to lap at the blood as it drained down his calves.
“ Oh, my God,” Jessica moaned. Her worst fears were realized before her eyes. “They may not be cannibals, but they are savages.” Kahoolawe justice appeared both cruel and torturous.
Jessica was roughly forced ahead. She and Parry stood now side by side, staring at the dangling man on the rack, his face a mask of pain and blood. He'd been slashed repeatedly about the face as well as the naked torso and limbs. Jessica recognized a zigzag pattern to the wounds, realizing that each had some ceremonial significance. Her eyes then traveled to the hapless victim's private parts. His penis had been removed and the stub sewed up and burned in order to cauterize the wound and keep him from bleeding to death. A quick death would obviously end the village's and the old chief's pleasure in watching the man die at the rate of a beheaded snake.
“ Oh, God, Jim,” she sobbed, grabbing onto Parry for support. “I never dreamed-”
Awai, the cane cutter in his hand, jabbed it into the suffering man's chin and lifted the face, allowing for study of the features. “Here's your mass killer, Lopaka,” he said.
“ Look closely on him,” bellowed Chief Kowona, still in as thick, feathered headdress, coming forward now. When he removed the headdress, they could clearly see that it was Joseph Kaniola.
“ Why, Kaniola, you son of a bitch. You're behind all this,” cursed Jim before lunging at the newspaperman and being restrained by the men around them. “Getting Oniiwah killed wasn't enough for you, no. You have more blood on your hands than you know what to do with, and now this?”
“ I don't expect either of you to believe me, but I had nothing whatever to do with the abduction of the Oniiwah boy. And I regret with my soul that I used his name in my paper. It was a mistake. I should have expected reprisals, but there's not a man here who hasn't made some mistake in this ugly business.”
Jessica, shaking her head in disbelief, pointedly asked him, “How could you-an educated, civilized man-be a part of this… butchery?”
“ Like you, I am a guest here, no more, no less. Chief Kowona, Lopaka's father, shares my grief at the loss of my son Alan, as well as the combined tears of those who've lost so many daughters, all due to the son he banished from his sight years ago.”
A man with regal bearing, despite being stoop-shouldered, appeared from the largest hut at the center of the village and Jessica, seeing the intricacy of the leis about his neck, the enormity of the handiwork that'd gone into his feathered kahilis and headdress, and his royal clothing, instantly guessed this to be the real Chief Kowona, for wherever he stepped, others hastened from his path, and wherever he pointed, others stared.
Jessica searched the old chief's wrinkled yet hard, leathery and brown countenance and the massive, swollen, heavy eyes, finding there a deep sense of remorse, shame and guilt commingling like ancient tenants. She imagined a well of withheld tears and the pain of not being in a position to allow the free flow of grief.
