With a shake of her head and a long-suffering expression on her broad, amiable face, park ranger Brenda Ho put the flowered note card down. Honestly, she thought, you didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Every day the mailroom table was piled with these pathetic bundles of misery; sometimes only five or six, often as many as twenty. Patiently wrapped with yards of tape, or trussed up with knotted string, or bound with metal straps, all of them bulging with chunks, lumps, strands, and crumbs of lava.
And every one of them making amends to Pele, Goddess of Fire, daughter of Haumea the Earth Mother and Wakea the Sky Father, who lived deep beneath the uneasy floor of Halemaumau Crater in what was now Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Pele, so the legend said, was a selfish and vindictive goddess who inflicted Job-like calamity on anyone who took even a handful of lava from her domain. The only way to lift the curse was to return to its source that which had been stolen and hope for mercy. And so they came pouring back into park headquarters, these humble objects of atonement, as if what this ceaselessly erupting wasteland needed was more lava.
And what the park rangers needed was more work.
Brenda rooted briefly through Mrs. Root's box. There were some irregular stones about the size of tennis balls, a mass of windblown lava strands that had cooled into the curious formations called Pele's hair, a few cupfuls of black sand, and a shell lei apparently offered as further propitiation. Everything had been sealed in a heavy plastic sack, then embedded in a sea of foam peanuts and finally packaged in a sturdy carton that was wrapped in enough layers of duct tape to survive the next world war. It had taken Brenda several minutes’ work with a utility knife to get it all open. And it had cost Mrs. Root $23.20 in postage.
'Pathetic,” Brenda murmured.
Across the table, Ruby Laney, the park's part-time administrative assistant, looked up over her half- spectacles.
'Another tearjerker?” With Brenda, she was going through the accumulation of packages, something they saved for four o'clock in the afternoon on Wednesdays and Fridays.
'Aren't they all?” Brenda said. She handed across the letter and the stamped, neatly addressed envelope. “She wants an answer.'
Mrs. Laney nodded and added them to the stack on a corner of the table. The responses would go out the next day. They would all say the same thing:
'Deposited within the park” was, to put it mildly, a euphemism. As always, all the detritus on the table would be carted less than a hundred feet, out to the “rock graveyard” in back of the administrative carport, and left there. Brenda wondered sometimes what the scientists were going to make of that ample mound of globe-trotting volcanic junk a hundred years from now.
Dumping behind the carport wasn't what Mrs. Root had in mind, but what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her, and neither Brenda nor anyone else had the inclination to lug the stuff out to the rim of the crater and solemnly drop it over the edge. In the first place, that was the kind of thing the rangers were there to prevent, not to perpetrate. You didn't take anything from a national park, and you didn't leave anything either. In the second place, and this was what made all the extra work so aggravating, the curse wasn't even genuine; there was no basis for it in Hawaiian mythology. No, Pele wasn't the kind of deity you'd want to go out of your way to irritate, but she didn't spend her time wreaking catastrophe on souvenir hunters either.
All the same, about fifteen years earlier the packaged lava had started to trickle back, infrequently at first, and now a steady, ever-growing flood. No one knew what had started it. The most likely theory was that the tour bus drivers, tired of cleaning up the volcanic debris left behind in their buses, had invented the story and energetically spread it. Or maybe the rangers themselves had, hoping to keep the tourists from walking off with the park.
However it had begun, it was now a sizable pain in the neck, time-consuming and depressing to boot. And as always, the incredible way people were able to delude themselves got Brenda down. Anything, it seemed, was better than accepting responsibility for a string of misfortunes, or even chalking them up to a simple run of bad luck. No, there had to be some grand celestial plan behind it. But who was it who had let the cat out on the road in the first place? Who had failed to check the porch for dry rot all these years? What
Well, the faster she worked, the sooner she'd be done. She reached for another packet, one of the slimmer ones this time, and opened it. Two gleaming pellets, black and tapering, fell onto the table; “Pele's tears,” droplets of lava that had solidified while still airborne. The letter with it was on textured, cream-colored stationery, thick and expensive, and written with a fountain pen, not a ballpoint. The handwriting was feminine, as regular and unaffected as a child's penmanship exercise.
There it was, that pitiful longing to find a
