Beach Bums Page 12

  An old mate from school had given him a lift upstream on the way out to the beach. The plastic kayak, Old Yella, had rattled around on the roof of his Datsun, tied down by long bungee ropes that hooked into the rolled-down windows. Now he could just take things easy, drifting home downstream. Well, not home exactly. Not anymore.

  The current kept the kayak near the center of the river. It had been raining up in the hills and the water was cloudy and running high. But in broad blue sky the bright sun beamed down on him. John arched his back and tried to relax; that was the point of this visit, after all. He had sat his final exams and had a few weeks to unwind before starting his master’s program.

  John took off his T-shirt, just to feel the air on his skin. His physique was passable at best, not bulging with muscle, but lean and symmetrical like a swimmer; his skin was pale from a year spent more in study than in nature. But his body seemed to remember the long slow strokes of the paddle; it seemed to remember the river.

  After a few deep breaths he felt some sense of perspective returning. Had his mistake been in coming home? Perhaps he was some kind of latent bigot and that was really his problem with Aroha. Or was he sulking like some child that his father had gone on with his life after Mum had died? It was hard to know; neither of his parents had set him up well for understanding emotions. Emotions were to be immediately expressed (Dad) or eternally suppressed (Mum), and that was all.

  But he was an adult now. He could do whatever the hell he wanted. And one of the things he had to do was finally tell his Dad, before the secret and the silence became a permanent barrier between them. He’d had three years at Uni to get over the awkwardness and accept himself. Getting through whatever his father would say was probably going to be harder.

  John coasted into an area of farmland. With no trees at the waterline, the landscape opened up bright and green around him. The bank had slipped a bit; a new bend was forming where the river wriggled in the grip of the pastoral landscape. Restrained, but not tamed. John dug the paddle in and pulled toward the far shore.

  There was a small muddy beach and the plastic bottom of the kayak scraped up onto it. John stepped out; the water was warm around his ankles. There were geothermal hot spots all along the river here. John dragged his kayak a bit further up. Wading back out into the water, he felt the warm, slimy silt swirl around his ankles even as the chilly flow of the water eddied up over his knees and thighs. He had meant to stop around here for lunch, but his sandwich stayed in the kayak. Somehow it was the river that continued to draw him—and a hunger that was not so easily sated. He just stood thigh-deep in the water, trying to decide what to do.

  But he did want to delay, to stop a while before slipping down the river back to the house. Dad thought John had a problem with Aroha being young, being nearer John’s own age. He thought John fancied her; it clearly fed his pride that he had a pretty young wife and John… well, John was not often seen with girls. John sighed. He wished he didn’t care what his father thought.

  He felt a slick tendril slide along his inner thigh.

  Bloody hell, son of a— “Just an eel,” he assured himself as he flailed back two steps. He froze. Just an eel.

  He edged towards the shore. Then the kayak bobbed out from under his hands and started to float slowly away from him. Part of him knew there was no way it could have moved the way it did on the sluggish river. He splashed forward but the kayak was already getting away into the deeper water. John lurched after it, feeling the cold water soak through the groin of his shorts and then lapping over the waistband. He leapt forward and grabbed the scarred plastic deck just before it escaped, fingers scrabbling until he got a good hold on the rim of the storage hatch in the stern.

  “Aha, got you, you bastard.”

  The riverbank slipped away from beneath his feet but John felt secure enough, so long as he had a grip on the kayak. He made his way, hand over hand, and turned it perpendicular to the current. He was just about to lift himself up into the cockpit when he felt something grab his trailing left ankle.

  It was an unmistakable feeling. It was not a submerged log, a strand of weed or lost anchor roper—it was a hand. John kicked hard, as hard as he dared without swamping the kayak. The hand held him implacably. Adrenaline washed through him, fizzing like dry ice. His mind groped for plausible scenarios. Could it be a prankster in scuba gear? Not even in the deepest waters of a river. He tried easing his foot upwards, but the hand only tightened its grip and pulled downward.

  John experienced a cascade of clichés: He thought of his family and his life. His bladder released and his whole body began to shake. He was vaguely intrigued by the fact that fear did indeed have these literal effects. He also realized that his unadventurous life had given him very little to remember or regret.

  Another hand closed over his left calf. The downward pull strengthened; the kayak trembled and sank lower so that the water began to stream over its slender prow.

  He regretted not telling his Dad, not trying a bit harder with Aroha—she hadn’t done anything wrong….

  John felt a strange paralysis as he sank slowly in the water. It seemed even colder. John’s fingers made a vain squeaking sound as they slipped over the hard carapace of the kayak. His forearms felt weak. He realized dimly that he was very much going out with a whimper.

  The hands suddenly released their grip; John bobbed in the water. With a gasp he was torn between wanting to get out of the water and wanting to turn and face the threat. John craned to look down into the milky depths. He could see the greenstone hanging from his neck—the tip of its tonguelike form just brushing the water. The murky shape of a three-fingered hand emerged slowly from the dark current.

  With a swift jerk the dark hand grabbed him again and pulled him under the water, down through the swift currents into the cold, cold, deep darkness.

  He awoke, but into a dream. Or at least it seemed like a dream. John could feel that he was breathing, but at the same time he was underwater. He floated upright, arms flung out. He was still being pulled down, but slowly, and then he just hung in the murky water. Then he was still. Even the current had vanished. He was perfectly weightless, staring into the veils of coffee-colored water, the heart of the river.

  He looked down again, just able to make out a dark shape, still feeling the hand holding his ankle like an anchor, like a band. Whoever, whatever it was moved, then rose very slowly through the water.

  It was a person, yes, a man. But not quite. Its right hand curled just behind John’s knee as it—no, he—floated languorously upward. Then the man from the depths looked up. Human—mostly. His eyes glowed the metallic green-blue of a paua shell. His mouth was wide and parted to offer a glimpse of sharp, pointed teeth. And again the three-fingered hand, releasing John’s ankle and reaching up in an effortless, swooping motion to the band of his shorts.

  Taniwha.

  Of course he’d heard of the mythical taniwha, the river monster, something to scare kids with and keep them away from the river. He was vaguely aware there was more to the story, about the taniwha being symbolic of the power of the chief, about there being one for every bend of the river. But he’d never known anyone who seriously thought they could be real.

  Except maybe Aroha.

  The taniwha pulled John’s shorts down and off. John watched them drift away and swiftly vanish into the murk. He felt rather than saw when the taniwha took his cock in its mouth. Cold shock, John’s eyes opened wide, and he looked down to a mass of swirling green-black hair against his pallid groin.

  This must be a dream.

  It felt warm. Sucking, rasping. He felt the light brushing of those dozens of tiny teeth. A threat or a promise that threw the animal response building up inside him into stark contrast. He didn’t look down again. That made it seem too real. He looked ahead into the water, a mass of motes and tiny bubbles that seemed to pulse in time with the beating of his heart.

  The creature sucked him, slow and long, then swallowed him d
eep. Each time, the tiny teeth touched his cock right at the base in a tidy ring. They seemed to say: so easy. So easy to shear this right off and make a meal of it. Make an end of you, right here. At first John felt a pulse of fear at each embrace of those tiny teeth. A deep beat of his head echoed out like a drum. The pendant on his chest jumped on his suddenly tender, resonating skin. The water flinched and swayed.

  But each time it happened his fear faded a bit, until it entirely faded away.

  He was in the hands of something older, something more powerful than any force against which struggle would make sense. He would be maimed, killed, or delivered to safety at the whim of the taniwha, and he had to be at peace with that. It was surprisingly easy. The tickle of teeth became part of the pleasure. Each fate came to feel somewhat the same, so that if he even had been given a choice, he would have been indifferent.

  Then there was only the touch. Eyes closed. Two hands holding him. The tongue, rough as a cat’s. The mouth, wide as a shark’s. The teeth, tickling. The climax dark, drowning, and welcome.

  An ambiguous space, of place and mind, resolved slowly into the riverbank at night. He was wearing his shorts and T-shirt again, barely even wet. Old Yella was pulled up neatly on the bank beside him with the paddle sticking up out of the cockpit. He recognized the pilings she was tucked up against as the old jetty next to the rainwater culvert, just one bend of the river away from his father’s house.

  Checking with one hand John found himself… intact. Well, physically, at least.

  There was some appeal to the idea of just pulling the kayak up into the bushes and walking the rest of the way home. Or running.

  But he had begun this journey in the water, and it seemed only fitting to end it the same way. In the end he had not been afraid. Not then, so why now? He wasn’t ready to think about it. He suspected he’d be thinking about it on and off for the rest of his life, so there was no hurry to get started.

  He yanked the grab handle and skated the kayak back onto the river, and then settled into the seat and guided himself cautiously down the last stretch. The water ran swift at night because that was when they opened the dam sluice if there had been rain up in the hills. There was just enough light to see, from the stars and from the windows of a few distant houses blinking between the trees.

  He came up all too quickly on the little clay bank nearest Dad’s place and dragged the kayak up under the trees, securing the stern with a bungee cord before walking up toward the house though the quiet streets. This far out of town there was just a streetlight on each corner, with reservoirs of darkness in between.

  He let himself in through the back door. Aroha was in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher. She took one look at him and seemed to see it all. See it all and have nothing much to say about it.

  His father came through from the living room in a burst. “Where on earth have you been?” he snapped. “It shouldn’t have taken you this long to get down from the Schmitt place. If you were going to start further up you should have said. It’s for safety, you know. So we know where to look for you if you don’t come back. And besides, you shouldn’t have gone so far that it would be dark before you got back.”

  John shrugged. “I started at the Schmitt farm. This is just how long the river took to get me back.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  Aroha came around them on her way to the living room. “Maybe the river had something to show him.”

  John could see that his dad didn’t agree with this philosophical perspective, but didn’t want to be disrespectful of Aroha’s point of view. He just clenched his jaw and looked for another target.

  “What the hell is that?” His eyes settled on the heavy pendant hanging down from John’s neck.

  “Oh, right.” John reached up, expecting to struggle with the knotted linen cord, but it came free easily in his hands. “Just something Aroha lent me.”

  “What do you mean?” his father barked. “That’s clearly a museum-qua—”

  John walked past his father and passed the greenstone pendant back to Aroha, who was now sitting on the sofa flipping through the Listener as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Whatever the stone was, it wasn’t anything he could or would explain. He was glad to be rid of it.

  “Did the river have something to show you?” she asked quietly.

  “Yeah, I think it did.”

  “What are you two whispering about?” He could see his father’s suspicions flaring up. But perhaps for the first time he was considering not only that John fancied Aroha, but that Aroha might fancy him back. It was going to be easy to set that right. And Aroha’s presence suddenly became strangely reassuring. Because the two of them knew that there are things in life so much more important than sexual orientation and worrying about winning or losing the approval of your father.

  “Hey, Dad,” John said. “Come sit down. There’s something I need to tell you.”

  ISLAND GETAWAY

  Neil Plakcy

  If you’re not happy here, there’s the door.” Mike pointed toward the front door, where our golden retriever, Roby, sat nervously watching us argue.

  “You’re such a drama queen,” I said. “Just because I don’t like the way you throw your clothes around the house doesn’t mean I want to move out.”

  We stood there facing each other. At just over six-four, Mike is about three inches taller than I am, though we both have straight dark hair, and because we’re both mixed-race we both have a slight epicanthic fold over our eyes. My skin is darker than his, but not by much, and sometimes people think that we’re brothers or cousins rather than partners.

  “I don’t know, Kimo, it seems like all we do is argue lately. We’re both always working, and when we get home we just get on each other’s nerves.”

  I couldn’t disagree with that—but I wasn’t ready to give up on the two years we’d spent living together, or the magnetic connection I felt to him when things were good.

  “So what do we do?” I asked. “You want to talk to a counselor or someone?”

  “I don’t think that kind of thing works. And I don’t like the idea of somebody else getting into our business.”

  At least he was still using the plural pronoun. He sat down on the sofa and Roby bounced over to pile on top of him. Mike looked at me and I sat down catty-corner to him, the dog sprawled between us.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Mike said. “We need to spend more time together.”

  When I left my apartment in Waikiki to move into Mike’s house in Aiea Heights, I had given up most of the time I had spent surfing, instead hanging out with Mike, talking or going out to eat or going on long runs together. Now I couldn’t remember the last run we’d taken.

  I seemed to get hit with one demanding case after another that kept me at police headquarters or out on the streets of O’ahu. And Mike, a fire investigator with the Honolulu Fire Department, had been asked to review the department’s procedures after a disastrous fire on the North Shore. When he wasn’t at work, he was hunched over his laptop, researching other departments’ policies and figuring out how to apply them to HFD.

  It didn’t leave either of us much time for domestic bliss, and the stress was starting to show.

  “We could go on vacation together,” he suggested.

  I sat down on the sofa sideways, so I could face him, and Roby sprawled on the floor between us. “Yeah, we could get a cheap flight to the mainland. San Francisco? Vegas? We could get onto one of those junkets.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t want to go somewhere to gamble or sightsee. I just want to hang out with you.”

  “And we can’t do that here?”

  He shook his head. “We’re both tied to our beepers. Even if we took time off, something would come up and one or both of us would have to go to work.”

  “Then where do you want to go?” I asked.

  “You ever been to Kauai?” There was something a bit too casual about the suggestion a
nd I was immediately suspicious. Cop habits die hard.

  I leaned back against the arm of the leather sofa, one of our first big joint purchases. “Long time ago. Before Iniki.”

  Hurricane Iniki was the deadliest hurricane to hit Hawai’i since they started keeping records. It devastated the island of Kauai. Thousands of homes had been damaged or destroyed, along with countless businesses. It had taken the island years to recover. “Why Kauai?” I asked.

  “Ben Keaumoku has a timeshare there that he can’t use. He’s looking for someone to take it over.”

  Ah. That was why he’d seemed overly casual when he brought the idea up. He’d already decided what he wanted to do but wanted to pretend it was a joint decision. I got a sour feeling in my stomach.

  Not that I didn’t want to go to Kauai, or even that I didn’t like Ben Keaumoku. Ben was one of the fire captains Mike worked with, and when Mike started taking his first tentative steps out of the closet after we got together the second time, Ben had been one of his most supportive friends.

  “When?” I asked.

  Mike looked down at Roby, avoiding my gaze. “Next week.”

  “Next week!” I squawked. “What if we can’t get off work?”

  He looked up. “I can. I already checked. You just have to ask.”

  “How long have you known about this?” I crossed my arms over my chest, too, even though I knew it was a defensive posture I shouldn’t be assuming with the love of my life.

  “Just today. His daughter has some kind of respiratory thing going on, and the doctor doesn’t want her to travel for the next month. I checked with the chief to be sure I could get the time.”