Chapter Seven - Puna-who?

The morning paper sat atop Rudy’s usual sidewalk table. He sipped his coffee and tried in vain to ignore the folded newspaper. He felt so silly that he could hardly bring himself to pick the paper up but finally he did and skimmed the sports section, carefully avoiding the want ads. He set it back down and re focused his attention on the coffee.

Finally he couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer so he opened it to “Autos for Sale” and his eyes went straight to it, just like Elder Jellyfish had said. ‘Perfect condition . Low miles, properly stored for 12 years. $2000 to the right party.’ The right party? What the hell did that mean? Was it a car or a puppy?

“You know where Punaluu is?” The voice at the other end said in thick pidgin. He was half expecting to hear “We don’t sell cars to no da kine haoles.”

“Puna-who?”

“Punaluu.”

“No.”

“What ‘bout da Liki-Liki?”

“Sounds familiar. It’s a highway, right?”

“Kay”, she said. “take da kine Liki-Like outta town, tru da tunnel an down da hill.” This girl was a native for sure, had probably never worn shoes in her life.

“Turn leff at da firs’ light onto Kamehameha. Follow da kine for tirdy minutes to da seven ‘leven, den go four more miles pass da art gallery and general store an' turn right at da mailboxes on da dirt road, all da way to da en’. Onny house dere. Tink you fine dat?”

“No problem,” Rudy said, certain that it was hopeless. No way was this car going to be in any kind of condition for two grand, having been parked for 12 years at the end of some Hawaiian mud road, but he had to see this through now.

Forty minutes later, to his surprise, he was in front of the house. He was even more surprised when he saw the 2002 in the driveway. It looked like a new car, inside and out. Not a speck of dust, not a rip in the upholstery, not a scratch in the paint. There had to be a catch.

The island girl of the thick Pidgin English emerged from the house. She had short, coal black hair, light blue eyes and honey-brown skin, a deeply tanned haole. If Meg Ryan dyed her hair black, had a little more muscular definition, and spent her life in the sun, she’d have been a less attractive version of this girl. She was drop-dead gorgeous and seemed completely oblivious of her stunning looks.

“It’s the Tii model, you know; fuel injected, extremely rare. Here, take it for a spin.” Not a hint of Pidgin now but it was definitely the voice from the phone.

Rudy took the keys and sat in the driver’s seat. The odometer read 27,512.

“Only 28,000 miles?” Rudy asked.

“Yeah, I kept it in storage for twelve years while I was away in the military. Plus, you don’t put too many miles on a car on an island.”

Rudy turned the key and the car fired up with a throaty growl. It idled smoothly. He poked slowly back to the highway, trying his best not to get this perfect car dirty on the muddy road. He turned left onto the pavement, moved slowly until he’d thrown the mud off the tires, and then put his right foot to the floor. The BMW laid down two symmetrical patches of rubber as it pushed him back into his seat.

The engine was strong and smooth all the way up to its 6500 rpm redline. He stabbed the brakes hard and let go of the steering wheel. The car stopped straight and quick. He already pictured himself tooling around Oahu in this car, windows down, breeze in his hair, Neil Young on the stereo. The Blaupunkt stereo.

He returned the car and told the island girl that he’d think about it and drove the old Nissan back to the 7-11. He sat on the trunk with a Perrier and watched some locals play basketball at the Beach Park across Kamehameha.

The ocean breeze blew through his hair; the surf was calm and peaceful. The car was perfect; the price was more than right, why was he hesitating? Only a fool would drive away and chance losing this deal.

After a while, he realized what the problem was: He wasn’t totally committed to staying, especially given how things had been going since he arrived. Plus that whole Elder Sea Nettle thing sending him here was just too bizarre. He watched the scene across the street and wondered why there was even a question. He’d come too far to turn back now. After all, this was paradise, right?

In a few minutes he was back at the house, knocking on the door. “Will you take fifteen hundred for it?” he asked when Island Girl opened the door.

“Come inside” she said. “My name’s Raven Olsson.”

“Rudy Davis.”

“Well, Rudy, what did my ad say I was asking for the car?” Her gaze was calm and steady and incredibly intimidating. She wreaked self confidence.

“Two thousand.”

“So why do you think I’d take fifteen hundred then?”

“Most people ask more than they really expect to get.” Rudy said, pleased to have a comeback. She was certainly in control of this negotiation.

“Well, Rudy, I’m not most people.” She said in a disarmingly calm voice. “I say what I mean. The price of the car is two thousand dollars.”

“Will you take travelers checks?” he asked sheepishly, feeling like an idiot for insulting her when they both knew that a specimen like this was worth several times the asking price.

“Sure, brudda,” she said with a smile, “Welcome to the islands. I have the title in my safe deposit box in town. Why don’t I pick up the title and meet you at your hotel tomorrow. I’ll give you a Bill of Sale for now. You can return your rental car and I’ll bring you back out here to get the Beemer. Where are you staying?’

“The Royal Grove.”

“I’ll meet you in front of the Royal Grove at noon.”

“Okay, but I have to ask you, how come you spoke such thick Pidgin on the phone?” He asked.

She laughed. “Couldn’t resist messing with you, brah. You just sounded so unbelievably white.”


At 12:30 the next day Rudy sat in the lobby of the Royal Grove paying careful attention to the traffic outside. He loved this lobby with its marble floor, open roof and mahogany columns and the overstuffed, old world comfort. He’d have enjoyed the ambiance if it weren’t for his current mental state.

I’ve been had, he thought as he checked his watch yet again. When will I ever learn?

At 12:40 a black GTI pulled up outside and he recognized Raven in the drivers seat. His heart skipped a beat and he realized that he’d been more worried that he’d never see Raven again than he was about the money.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said as he approached the car. “I sold a piece and it took longer to work out the details than I expected. I’ll bet you thought I was trying to pull a fast one on you.”

He let out a too-loud, nervous laugh. “Never crossed my mind.” He lied.

They worked their way through the midday Honolulu traffic while Raven proceeded to tell him her life story.

She’d been raised on Kauai by the quintessential sixties hippy parents. Her mother was a well-known local artist and the family did quite well between her Mother’s art and the gallery her father owned and managed. They’d become embarrassingly affluent for counter-culture liberals who were supposed to shun materialism.

Raven had inherited her mother’s talent but instead of pursuing a career as a painter, she joined the army right after graduating from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. She wanted to see some of the world beyond the little island she’d been raised on and she also wanted to find her own way in life.

Her mother was semi-famous on the islands and Raven didn’t want to ride her coat tails. Perhaps she’d picked the army because it was the antithesis of the liberal household she’d been raised in.

Things changed for Raven when she was stationed near San Antonio. She heard about exotic woods that were left behind when they harvested the rain forests of South America and she had an idea.

When a rain forest is clear cut, she explained, many large pieces of old growth exotic woods are left behind in the recklessness that often accompanies such harvesting. It seemed wrong to her and she struck upon the idea of traveling to South America and harvesting the scraps to make furniture.

She was against clear cutting anything, particularly old growth rainforest, but once they were harvested, it was just as wrong not to use every possible scrap. She likened it to the way the Indians used every scrap of a buffalo they harvested. They lived in harmony with their environment for hundreds of years until the white man came and killed buffalo indiscriminately.

There was a lot of dissension about her plan within the environmental community but she did her own research and she did her own thinking and decided that it was the right thing to do. If she had ordered the clear cutting, that would be different, but what she did was salvage the waste that was left behind, making something good from a bad situation.

She rented a building in an old run-down industrial section of town, borrowed some money from her parents and flew to Honduras to select her first “scrap” piece.

She’d never forget her excitement on the day that it arrived. It was a huge chunk of Honduran Mahogany that had been cut from a stump that was left behind when its trunk had been harvested. It was six feet in diameter and two and a half feet thick and weighed more than 3600 lbs.

Honduran Mahogany was plentiful, thanks to plantation harvesting but it has become nearly extinct in several South and Central American countries, she explained. Plantation wood was of little interest to her since it wasn’t a big environmental issue. It was the old growth scrap that she wanted to harvest.

Once the wood was secure in the warehouse, she rigged a makeshift kiln and dried the piece until its moisture content was perfect. She spent many days at the warehouse, looking at the piece, visualizing its grain, its color, trying to picture what it was meant to be. She tried to let go of any preconceived notions and let the wood tell her what it was to become.

She filled an entire sketch pad with pencil drawings until an armoire eventually emerged. It was a unique piece whose design was somewhere between Scandinavian simplicity and Hemingway richness. The large doors were a mosaic of criss-crossed grains with subtle differences in hue that formed a portrait of the 150 foot tall tree that it had come from.

It took nearly two months of working every available minute to finish the piece but when it was finished, she knew that she had accomplished something special.

Friends of her parents ran a local art gallery and they came to see the piece at her mother’s request. They recognized right away that this was not furniture; it was art, a sort of functional wood sculpture. They pleaded with her to let them show it and she played hard to get before consenting, secretly thrilled by their insistence. The piece sold on its first day in the gallery for $50,000.

Raven was able to pay her parents back and then she flew to Columbia to select another piece of wood. Her Army enlistment expired a short time later and she moved to Oahu and was soon making a very handsome living.

They were both enjoying the conversation and neither was eager for it to end when they arrived at Raven’s house in Punaluu. She suggested that they go for a late lunch at a seafood counter she knew of in Kawela and Rudy jumped at the chance to spend more time with her.

Their lunch destination was a tiny counter in a little General Store in a town that consisted of little else. Before they got out of the car, Raven took her shoes off so Rudy followed suite, painfully aware of how unnatural his lily white bare feet looked compared to hers.

The grass was damp and extraordinarily green from the shower that had passed through a short time earlier and he liked how it felt on his bare feet. It had been years since he’s walked barefoot through the grass. He was careful to avoid the bright red mud in front of the old wooden lanai steps at the entrance. The old-west storefront and rusted tin roof reminded him of a similar General Store in Hoolehua, near where he’d lived on Molokai many years ago.

They sat on the front steps eating their Ono sandwiches and drinking Dr. Pepper.

“It must have been tough growing up haole on Kauai.” Rudy asked, remembering what it was like for him on Molokai.

A lot Hawaiians hate haoles for stealing their land and bringing diseases that had been unheard of prior to the arrival of Captain Cook. Rudy had gotten off easy because he learned to speak Pidgin and was dark skinned enough to pass for Hawaiian, something his fair-skinned sister had resented him for.

Even without the racial tensions it was a violent society. The two years on Molokai had been hell for his sisters, much as he imagined life of Kauai must have been for Raven.

“Yeah, you learned to take care of yourself real fast.” She replied. “Did they have ‘beat up a haole’ day at your school too?”

“Yeah, every day.” He chuckled. “I guess that explains the thick Pidgin routine you gave me on the phone.”

“I couldn’t help messing with you. You may have mastered Pidgin when you lived here but you’re as haole as haole gets now.”

He watched her face as she spoke, the way she moved her lips, the way her eyes twinkled when she smiled. God she was beautiful. He loved how shiny her short black hair was, and the honeyed color of her skin, but her real beauty came from her quiet confidence, her total ease with herself. Everything about her said this was an intelligent, self-assured woman. He was stunningly, stupidly, ridiculously attracted to her.

Back at her house, she gave him the tour. Half a mile west of the ocean, lush green volcanic cliffs rise a thousand feet straight in the air like a huge monument to Pele, the Hawaiian fire goddess. Raven’s house sat on the gentle slopes and low lands between the cliffs and the ocean.

“My property goes all the way back to the cliffs” she said.

Rudy took in the view from her lanai. Her studio, an elegant wooden barn topped with three cupolas, sat directly behind the house in the shadow of the cliffs. The frame was hand-cut joinery that she had done herself with the help of some hired labor. It was surrounded on three sides by a lanai. A loading dock for unloading the wood and loading the finished pieces had been dug on the near end.

“How about a Margarita?” Raven asked.

“Maybe just a shot of tequila.” Rudy answered, glad for a reason not to leave just yet.

He browsed through her CD collection while she made the drinks. Her taste in music was impeccable, which of course meant that it leaned toward blues like his.

“So, that’s all about me.” She said when she emerged from the kitchen with the drinks. “What brings you to Paradise?”

“Like you said, it’s paradise, right?” He proceeded to tell his story, minus a few of the more embarrassing details about his relationship with Circe.

“Well, if Hawaii doesn’t inspire a best seller, nothing will. That’s why I returned to the islands.”

“To write?” he teased.

“To work. I’ve been all over the world and I’ve seen some incredible things but when I was ready to settle down, there was no where else I wanted to be. Of course, I do have to live on a different island from my family.” She said with a smile. “I love ‘em to death but a few miles of ocean between us isn’t such a bad thing.”

“Yeah.” Rudy said. “If you knew my Mormon parents, you’d know I get that.”

They sat on the lanai and finished the Tequila and talked and laughed for two more hours before Rudy reluctantly excused himself, fearful of wearing out his welcome.

“I hope I see you again.” He said awkwardly, as he headed for the BMW. He thanked her for everything and sped away.

Back on Kamehameha, the car was flawless and Rudy was on his game, working the gears and pushing the BMW hard through the curves. It was a fabulous ride back to the Royal Grove with the windows down, island breeze in his hair and Neil Young on the stereo. He’d stashed the tape in his shirt pocket, anticipating this very scene.

On top of it all, he had a nice little Raven buzz going. Back at his room, the red message light was flashing. It was from Raven. She was having a luau on Saturday, would he come?

He smiled at the disparity between this and the last message he’d listened to. Could it really have been barely a week ago?

Would he come? Do pigs have wings?

© 2008. David Heiniger. All Right Reserved.