Fires of Eden Page 5

  The Gulfstream continued to descend.

  FIVE

  A male this, the female that

  A male born in the time of black darkness

  The female born in the time of groping in the darkness.

  —from the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant composed about 1700 A.D.

  Eleanor brushed aside the simplistic rental-car agency map and set her own highway map of the island on the counter. “What are you saying, that I can’t get there from here?”

  The thin blonde woman behind the counter shook her head. “No, no, it’s just that you can’t go the south way. The ash and lava flow have cut off Highway Eleven.” The woman stabbed a bony finger at the single black ribbon that ran around the south end of the island. “Here, just beyond Volcanoes National Park.”

  “That’s about…what?” said Eleanor. “Forty miles from here?”

  “Yeah,” the blonde woman said, wiping sweat from beneath her bangs. “But Highway Nineteen’s open.”

  “The northern route,” said Eleanor. “All the way up the coast, across to Waimea or Kamuela…which is it? I’ve seen the town listed both ways.”

  The woman shrugged. “The post office there says Kamuela. We all call it Waimea.”

  “Across the hills to Waimea,” continued Eleanor, tracing the path with her finger, “down to the Kohala Coast, and then south to Kona…”

  “Highway Nineteen becomes Highway Eleven there,” said the woman. The gum she was chewing smelled of tired spearmint.

  “And then south to the Mauna Pele,” finished Eleanor. “About a hundred and twenty miles?”

  The woman behind the counter shrugged again. “Something like that. You sure you wanna drive it? It’s almost dark. A lot of the other Kona Coast guests are bein’ put up in hotels here in Hilo until the resorts can get vans over in the morning.”

  Eleanor rubbed her chin. “Yes, United offered that, but I’d prefer to get there tonight.”

  “It’s almost dark,” repeated the woman in a tone that let it be known that it was no skin off her nose if the haole wanted to go wandering around the Big Island in the dark.

  “What about this road?” said Eleanor, her finger following a curving black line that led out of Hilo and cut across the north central bulk of the island. “Saddle Road?”

  The blonde woman shook her head so adamantly that her bangs flopped. “Uh-uh, can’t use that.”

  “Why not?” Eleanor leaned on the counter. The row of car rental booths was outdoors, just across from the main terminal. The air was thick with humidity and fragrant with sea air and a thousand floral scents. As many times as Eleanor had been to the tropics, she always forgot that pleasant shock of heat, humidity, and outdoorness that assaulted one immediately upon stepping off the plane or out of the terminal. The terminal here at Hilo was small enough and open enough that the smells and sounds of Hawaii had enfolded her the second she had stepped off the jet port. Having only passed through Hawaii on her way somewhere more remote and exotic during her almost three decades of traveling, Eleanor had been shocked by the American-ness of it all.

  “Why can’t I take the Saddle Road?” repeated Eleanor. “It looks shorter than following Highway Nineteen all the way north.”

  The woman was still shaking her head. “You can’t. It violates the rental agreement.” She prodded at the forms Eleanor had just completed filling out.

  “Why, isn’t it paved?”

  “Well…sort of…but you can’t drive on it. It’s too rough. Too remote. No services. Not even any houses. You break down, there’s no way we can get to you.”

  Eleanor smiled. “I just rented a Jeep. At seventy dollars a day. Are you telling me that your Jeep is going to break down?”

  The woman folded her arms. “You can’t take the Saddle Road. It’s not even on the map we gave you.”

  “I noticed,” said Eleanor.

  “It would violate the contract.”

  “I understand,” said Eleanor.

  “It’s not a road we allow our vehicles on.”

  “I believe you,” said Eleanor. She touched the contract and then pointed to the darkening sky. “Can I get the keys to the Jeep now? It’s getting dark.”

  It took Eleanor almost half an hour to find where the Saddle Road left the suburbs of Hilo. Winding up through the last few houses and palm trees into the mountain scrub, she kept glancing in the mirror at the wall of clouds moving in from the east. It was raining hard just a mile offshore and headed her way.

  She had lost fifteen minutes after checking out the open Jeep. It was a new Wrangler, fewer than twenty miles on the odometer, with an automatic transmission that Eleanor would have paid extra to do without, but there was no strap-down vinyl top tucked in the back or under the seat. Eleanor had rented four-wheel-drive vehicles on four continents, and even the most battered old open Rover or Toyota had some sort of foul-weather gear to lash over the roll bar.

  “Oh, you mean the bikini top,” said the blonde woman when Eleanor had driven back and waited for another client to finish his transaction.

  “Whatever you call it. Usually they tie or Velcro on.”

  The woman nodded, obviously bored. “We don’t include it anymore. Not with this new batch of vehicles. We take them out and store them.”

  Eleanor tried an old trick of counting to ten in Greek. It sometimes kept her from assaulting idiots. “Why is that?” she asked at last, her voice soft in a way that invariably made her students fidget with anxiety.

  The woman chewed her gum. “People kept losin’ them. Or losin’ the little tie thingies.”

  Eleanor smiled and leaned closer. “Do you live in Hilo, miss?”

  The gum popped and began its chew cycle again. “Sure.”

  “Do you know how much rain you get on this side of the island? How many inches per year?”

  The woman shrugged.

  “I don’t live here,” said Eleanor, “but I can tell you the annual rainfall. More than a hundred and fifty inches. Per year. Sometimes as much as two hundred inches just up the valley.” She leaned even closer. “Now, are you going to rig my Jeep with some sort of cover, or do I have to drive the thing up those stairs and park it on the sidewalk here and wait for the reporters to show up while I’m talking long-distance to the president of your company?”

  The “bikini top” rattled and flapped in the gale blowing in ahead of the storm as Eleanor drove up Waianuenue Avenue past Rainbow Falls and swung west on the Saddle Road, but she figured that the stupid strip of vinyl should keep her relatively dry unless she had to drive through a hurricane.

  It was twilight as Eleanor flogged the Jeep up a series of curves past signs for Kaumana Caves and the Hilo Golf Course and into the realm of mountain shrubs. The road narrowed until it was barely wide enough for two vehicles, but she had encountered few cars and the pavement was fine here.

  The rain caught her less than ten miles west of Hilo. Clever design by the Chrysler Jeep Division had ensured that the combination of upright windshield and flapping vinyl would channel the rainfall down the back of her neck and onto the inside of the windshield. The clunky wipers made swipes at clearing the outside of the glass, but Eleanor had to dig in her purse for a Kleenex to mop the inside. The rear compartment of the Jeep began to fill with rain within minutes, so Eleanor tossed her purse and duffel bag on the passenger seat to keep them dry. There was still a splendid sunset going on somewhere to the west, but the low clouds and rain here had brought on a premature nightfall.

  Eleanor caught a last glimpse of the lights of Hilo in her mirror and then she was over the crest of a ridge and there was nothing visible except the bulk of the two volcanoes on either side of the narrow road and a tangle of low trees. There were no lights ahead, the road had no center stripe, and the effect was that of entering a tunnel of darkness. Eleanor tried the radio, found only static, and switched it off, humming contentedly to herself, keeping time with the swwssshh-tk of the wipers.

  Suddenly the
road entered a wider part of the valley between the two volcanoes—Mauna Kea to her right, Mauna Loa to her left—the clouds parted for a moment, and Eleanor caught a glimpse of a sunset gleam high on the icy flanks of Mauna Kea. Something metallic, perhaps one of the observatories, sent mirror flashes into the dark valley. But even more impressive was the orange-flame glow of the Mauna Loa eruption to her left. Previously hidden by clouds, the mass of the volcano was now revealed by the light of molten flames reflected on its own low ash plume. Eleanor had the fleeting impression that she was traveling down a hallway into a burning house, with heavy pillars to either side. To the west, the last of the fiery sunset mixed with volcano glow to ignite the clouds into a slow combustion of colors. Eleanor saw a double rainbow pacing the Jeep to her left, and despite the fact that she had read somewhere that the laws of optics do not allow one to catch up to a rainbow, she drove through it.

  Then the rain came again and the sunset disappeared, the reflected light from the eruption on the other side of Mauna Loa receding to a sullen glow.

  Eleanor began to understand why the car rental people were so apoplectic about the prospect of driving on the Saddle Road. The narrow road wound and dodged, as if trying to throw any pesky vehicles off its back. The trees in this valley were low and ugly but thick enough to block the view so that Eleanor had to slow for every curve in the endlessly curving road. Twice, battered cars passed the other way, and neither time were their headlights visible until seconds before the encounter. After fifteen or twenty miles of this exhausting driving, Eleanor saw the only other road on the entire stretch of highway: a small sign pointed to a narrow lane running off to the right toward Mauna Kea State Park and Mauna Kea itself. She knew from reading her map and guidebook that this road dead-ended near the summit of the volcano some fifteen miles and eight thousand feet higher, but it would have been easy to take a wrong turn here and find that out the hard way. Eleanor tried to imagine the dedication it took for the astronomers who lived and worked up there, gasping in the cold, thin air of almost fourteen thousand feet, trying to take their photographs and do their measurements before altitude sickness and its oxygen-deficit stupidity forced them down for R&R. Eleanor had always thought that the academic environment on campus brought on a similar enforced stupidity, but at least one could breathe there.

  Beyond the Mauna Kea turnoff, the road deteriorated. Signs, half glimpsed in the orange-tinged gloom, announced that it was illegal to stop by the roadside and warned of unexploded shells lying about. Twice she caught sight of large armored vehicles crashing and rending their way through underbrush to her left, their weak headlights throwing beams as watery as lantern light. Suddenly, Eleanor had to slam on the Jeep’s brakes and sit, mouth half open with shock, as four of these armored behemoths crashed across the road ahead of her, their treads spewing up asphalt as if it were mud.

  When they were gone, she pulled ahead slowly, peering from left to right, hearing the damned monsters out there in the brush but not able to see them. A sign appeared in the gloom, its redundant legend almost invisible in the rain: WARNING: MILITARY VEHICLE CROSSING. Eleanor assumed this entire valley was some sort of military reservation. She hoped that was the case; otherwise it appeared that the U.S. Army had declared war on Hawaii.

  Eleanor drove on, mopping the inside of the windshield, her back wet, her hair soaked, her canvas espadrilles soaking up water from the two-inch puddle sloshing around between her seat and the accelerator. Her eyes flicked from side to side like a fighter pilot’s, always ready for another convoy of tanks or stegosauruses or whatever the hell had appeared or disappeared mere moments before.

  Suddenly, just as she came around a twisting right-hand curve, the patched asphalt corrugated here to the point her fillings vibrated in her teeth, Eleanor had to swerve to miss a dark gray car half in the ditch and half on the road. A human form was on the road, looking under the left rear of the vehicle. Eleanor bit her lip and fought the oversized steering wheel as the Jeep threatened to skip sideways right into the underbrush on the left side of the road, and it took half a minute before she had the heavy thing under control and centered in the narrow strip of asphalt. She glanced in her rearview mirror, but the car and human form next to it were out of sight behind the low hill she had just passed over.

  “Damn,” muttered Eleanor, and brought the Jeep to a stop. The rain whipped in on the back of her neck.

  The form she had seen back there had been short and stocky and it had not looked up when the Jeep passed. There had been no wave for help. But Eleanor had the retinal memory of a shapeless dress plastered to the stocky form.

  The road was too narrow and the ditches too deep here to risk a U-turn, so Eleanor set the automatic selector to Reverse and backed over the rise, hoping that she would have at least a second’s warning if headlights suddenly appeared.

  There were no headlights. Eleanor backed the Jeep down the hill, wiping her glasses against the rain, and stopped next to the car in the ditch. It was some sort of cheap rental econobox. The left rear had been jacked up, but it looked as if the asphalt had buckled under the narrow jack, sliding the car deeper into the ditch. The person crouching near the rear of the car stood up.

  “Miserable piece of shit,” said a husky voice. “The spare’s one of them little pissant undersized emergency jobs, supposed to get you to the next gas station. When the two-bit jack bit off the edge of the road there, the damned frame come down on the spare and ripped it all to shit.”

  “Are you all right?” asked Eleanor. She could see that it was a woman, short, moon-faced, her stringy hair plastered to her forehead and ears, the thin dress—what Eleanor’s mother would have called a housedress—soaked through and seemingly painted over heavy thighs, bulging middle, and small breasts.

  The woman sluiced her hair out of tiny eyes and squinted at Eleanor in the rain. “It’s a rental and I’m going to leave it here. You headin’ over to the west coast?”

  “Yes,” said Eleanor. “Want a ride?” Before she had finished the query, the woman had pulled open the rear door of the rental, tugged out two old suitcases, and tossed them into the back of the Jeep with no apparent concern for the pool of water there.

  The woman hefted herself up onto the passenger seat, lifted Eleanor’s purse and duffel, and said, “Mind if I set these back on my stuff?”

  “No, fine.”

  “They’ll get wet. But they’ll get wet if I set ’em down here, too.”

  Eleanor nodded. “The back’s fine.” She was no Henry Higgins, but Eleanor prided herself on discerning dialect. This woman was not a native Hawaiian. She came from the Midwest; Eleanor guessed Illinois, although parts of Indiana or Ohio were possible.

  She jammed the Jeep in gear and drove over the rise again. The rough road continued to wind through low trees. Reflected flames from Mauna Loa tinged everything with an eerie glow. “Car just run off the road?” asked Eleanor, hearing her own mid-western dialect kick in. It was a habit she allowed herself when off campus, her native accent having been eroded away during her years at Columbia and Harvard before returning to Oberlin.

  The woman wiped her face with thick hands that were greasy from her work under the car. Eleanor noted the unself-consciousness of the act, more a man’s motion than a woman’s. “Didn’t just run off the road,” said the woman. “Some damn APC come out of the brush and almost hit me. I got a wheel off into that ditch and another wheel flat, but at least I avoided becomin’ Desert Storm roadkill. Damn APC didn’t even look back.”

  “What’s an APC?” Eleanor used her wad of Kleenex to mop the inside of the windshield. The rain seemed to be letting up.

  “Armored personnel carrier,” said the woman. “They’re from the Pohakuloa Military Camp that we’re passin’ through. Boys out playing their games.”

  Eleanor nodded. “Are you connected with the military?”

  “Me?” The woman laughed as unself-consciously as she had mopped her face. It was a deep, throaty sound—what A
unt Beanie referred to as “a whiskey laugh.”

  “Hell no,” said the woman, her voice still amused. “I don’t have nothing to do with the Army except for two of my six boys who done time in the service.”

  “Oh,” said Eleanor, somewhat disappointed in her faulty speculation. It had seemed sensible that this no-nonsense woman was affiliated with the Army. “You knew what an APC was,” she said, realizing as she said it how lame it sounded.

  The woman laughed again. “Yeah, but don’t everybody? Didn’t you watch CNN during the Gulf War?”

  “Not really,” said Eleanor, her voice vibrating up and down the scale as they bounced over the washboard pavement. The road was rising.

  Her passenger looked at her through the gloom and then seemed to shrug. “Well, my boy, Gary, was over there, so I guess I had me more reason than some to pay attention. And I admit it, after livin’ through Vietnam and the Iran hostage thing, it wasn’t too bad watching us kick somebody’s butts other than our own.” As if remembering something, the woman stuck out her hand.

  Startled, Eleanor lifted her hand from the wheel to shake. She felt calluses on the other woman’s palm.

  “My name’s Cordie Stumpf…that’s S-T-U-M-P-F…and I’m much obliged that you stopped for me. I could’ve been out there for a long time, given how little traffic there is. Except for those goddamn APCs, of course, but I don’t think I would’ve wanted to go where they’re going.”

  “Eleanor Perry,” said Eleanor, retrieving her hand and fighting the Jeep around another hard turn. “You said you’re headed for the west coast. Which part?”

  “One of the fancy resorts,” said Cordie Stumpf. She was rubbing her bare arms as if she were cold. Eleanor realized that it was cold at this altitude, in the dark, in the rain.

  “Which one?” said Eleanor, turning on the heater. “I’ll be going south to the Mauna Pele.”

  “Yeah,” said Cordie.

  Eleanor looked over inquisitively. It was hard to believe that this woman in her print housedress with her clunky old suitcases was headed for one of the most expensive resorts in Hawaii. I should talk, thought Eleanor. I’ll use up five years of savings in this one week of foolish adventure.