Josh grinned at him. “A little, maybe. But so what? You’re gonna love it!”
Maybe I should call Mom back, Michael thought as he and the two other boys piled into Josh’s rusting pickup truck. Maybe I should tell her what we’re really doing. After all, if something happens …
Forget it, he told himself. All she’ll do is worry.
CHAPTER 7
“You sure this is a good idea?” Michael asked again. He, Josh Malani, Jeff Kina, and two other guys from the track team — Rick Pieper and someone named Kioki, whose last name Michael didn’t remember — had grabbed hamburgers, fries, and Cokes at a place called Peggy Sue’s. As they ate, Josh explained how they would equip themselves at Kihei Ken’s Dive Shop: “He leaves the key under the barrel behind the back door.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Michael asked, though by now he thought he knew Josh well enough to be certain that whatever peculiar illogic his friend might come up with, he would manage to make it sound reasonable.
“Ken’s my friend, and he’d say it was okay.”
“Why don’t you just call him and ask him?” Michael asked, which only netted him one of Josh’s patented looks of complete scorn.
“He’s off-island, for Christ’s sake. He’s over on Lanai and won’t be back till tomorrow. Come on, Mike, don’t give me a hard time! I’m your best friend.”
“You’re also crazy,” Michael reminded him.
Josh’s affable grin spread wide. “That’s not news. But you still saved my life, so I wouldn’t mess you up, would I?”
At the time, the final logic had seemed impeccable. Now that he was actually standing at the back door of Ken’s Dive Shop with three guys he’d known only since that afternoon, and one good friend who was — according to everyone who had known him a lot longer than Michael — certifiably crazy, he wasn’t so sure.
What if an alarm went off?
What if they got caught?
What if they got taken to jail?
But even as the questions rose in Michael’s mind, Josh Malani fished the key out from under the barrel in back, unlocked the door, and flipped on the lights.
“Jeez, Josh! Shut off the lights!” Jeff Kina demanded.
“Why?” Josh asked. “We’re not doing anything wrong. Come on in and help me find what we need.”
It didn’t take nearly as long as Michael thought it would: within ten minutes they had enough gear for all five of them in the bed of Josh’s truck. But as Jeff Kina started loading air tanks, he swore.
“What’s wrong?” Michael asked.
“There’s only one full tank,” Jeff said. “Any of you guys know how to work the compressor?”
Everyone shook their heads and shrugged helplessly, and Michael felt a moment of relief, thinking they might have to bag the whole plan. But just as he was about to suggest they haul the gear back in from the truck, Josh found five more tanks on a shelf next to the door that separated the back room from the shop. His new friends loaded four of them into the truck, with the full tank from the first batch of tanks they found, then the boys all piled in.
They drove south on Kihei Road, through Wailea and out past Makena Beach. The road narrowed and grew bumpy, and finally they came to a tiny cove where the water glittered in the light of an almost full moon. Michael began to relax, then realized Josh wasn’t going to stop. “What was wrong with that bay?” he asked, peering back over his shoulder. Even in the darkness, the inlet looked reasonably safe.
“LaPerrouse?” Josh asked. “That’s for tourists. We’re goin’ to the goldfish bowl.”
They kept moving farther south. Finally, the dense thickets of kiawe that lined both sides of the road gave way to what at first looked to Michael like a huge field of freshly plowed earth, hundreds of acres of it, spreading away from the road in both directions. Then he realized he wasn’t looking at a field of earth at all: he was looking at raw lava.
Lava so desolate that practically nothing grew on it. In the darkness, it held a forbidding aura that made him shiver despite the warmth of the air.
They were deep into the lava field when Josh pulled the truck off the road into a narrow parking area.
Michael looked around, seeing nothing but the vast expanse of lava. “Where’s the goldfish bowl?” he asked.
“At the end of the flow,” Josh told him. “There’s a path a little farther down the road, but this is as close as you can park to it. Practically nobody knows about it.” The five boys scrambled out of the truck, slung their air tanks onto their backs, and picked up the bags they’d filled with regulators, masks, fins, and life vests. Josh led them down the road two hundred yards, then stepped over a pipe that ran parallel to the asphalt pavement.
“What’s that?” Michael asked.
“Water pipe,” Jeff Kina told him. “It’s too hard to bury it in the lava, so they just lay it along the surface next to the road.”
They were picking their way through the lava now, but Michael saw no sign of anything that looked like a path until they came to a sign that warned them against overnight camping. “This is really a path?” he asked as he gingerly made his way across lava that looked sharp enough to slash him if he so much as touched it.
“That’s the neat thing,” Josh explained. “If you don’t know exactly where it is, you can’t find it.”
“I know where it is, and most of the time I still can’t find it,” Rick Pieper muttered. “Last time I came out here, I almost tore my feet off.”
“Quit bitchin’,” Kioki told him. “It’s easy.” Then, a second later, he lost his balance, instinctively put a hand out to steady himself, and howled in pain. “Goddamn it, I hate this stuff!”
“So go back and wait in the truck,” Josh told him.
“No chance,” Kioki shot back. “I’m okay.”
Forty minutes later they came to a small cove that was almost completely landlocked by a long tongue of lava that protected it from the open ocean. While the pool itself lay serenely still, no more than twenty feet away the heaving sea clawed at the embracing arm of rock. It was as if a hungry animal were attempting to dig its prey out of a protective burrow. The surf snarled, and angry fountains of foam spewed into the sky like the anticipatory saliva of a beast about to feed. For a long time Michael stared at the spectacle, wondering how safe the pool really was.
“It’s okay,” Josh Malani told him, once again accurately reading his thoughts. “There’s only one channel into the pool, and it’s over on the other side, in the lee. There’s hardly even any current, and I won’t be more than a couple yards away from you. Okay?”
Michael nodded, still unsure if he wanted to go into the water, which seemed to have darkened even as he stared at it. He told himself it was only his imagination, since the moon was shining as brightly as ever. The other guys were already stripping their clothes off, and soon all of them were naked and helping each other strap on their tanks and check their regulators. Then, one by one, they went into the pool, until only Michael and Josh were still on the beach.
“You want to skip it?” Josh asked. There was nothing of his usual mocking tone now, and Michael guessed that if he decided to chicken out, Josh would make sure the other boys thought it was his own idea to stay out of the water. In fact, he suspected Josh might even go as far as to slash his foot on the lava, if he thought that’s what it would take to convince everyone that Michael hadn’t lost his nerve.
He looked at the water once more, then punched Josh on the shoulder. “Let’s do it,” he said.
They backed in until they were up to their waists, then Michael checked his regulator one last time, lowered himself, stretched out, and rolled over.
The water closed around him, and, as it had on his first dive, the world changed.
It was nothing like the daytime dive. The sunlight was gone, and with it the Day-Glo colors of the coral and the fish. Now the water was infused with a silvery glow from the moon, and the fish that darted among the
