But recently, his luck had gone to hell.
Boone watched the kooks climb the wide set of steps the county had set into a faux rock wall to foster access for the tourists or something. He remembered when Pleasure Point felt like a community instead of a destination resort, when a carpenter or a teacher could afford to rent or even buy a house because there weren’t vacation rentals on every corner — or giant paychecks that allowed people from over the hill to build giant houses only they could afford. He remembered when you had to walk a narrow dirt path and hang onto a knotted rope to get down the cliff to the water, which kept out the people who did not deserve the waves.
He blamed the seawall and its stairs for what had happened to the neighborhood, for drawing crowds into the water, for making it so you had to worship at the altar of money in order to live here.
Sometimes he thought about putting a piece of dynamite in that phony wall and blowing everything back to the way it was. But he was not a violent man. Not anymore.
In his younger days, his anger had driven him to break noses and smash car windows. He’d spent a year in the county jail for a beat-down he’d given to a guy outside the Corner Pocket bar. After that, he found a job at a local tree service, chain-sawing overhanging limbs and view-blocking branches. He tried to get sober but was having trouble because the Point held so many reminders of why he liked to drink. He saved just enough money to get him and his board to Oahu where he’d hitchhiked to the North Shore and lived under a kiawe tree for the next four months while he got clean.
His third week there, he’d awakened to find an old man standing over him with a rooster in his arms. The deep lines on the old man’s face reminded him of a lava field and the rooster looked as if someone had started to pluck him for dinner but quit halfway through the job.
“She talks to you, don’t she?” the old man said. He had bare feet and wore a faded T-shirt and ragged shorts. “She don’t talk to everybody, you know.”
Boone sat up and rubbed his sun-ravaged eyes. He’d pledged to buy himself a cheap pair of sunglasses the next time he was in town but always forgot — consequently, every morning was like having spent the night with sandpaper glued under his eyelids. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.
“Heh-heh.” The old man set the half-naked chicken on the ground and they began to walk away. “Next time you have a beer for me, eh?”
It wasn’t that Boone had intended to buy the old man beer, but he’d trimmed a couple of palm trees for one of the landlords who owned a few houses on the beach and had a little money in his pocket. He hitchhiked into town and bought a ten-dollar pair of sunglasses and a six-pack of Miller High Life, along with a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, his main source of nourishment.
The old man and the rooster came back that afternoon as if they’d known about his windfall. The ancient accepted a beer and Boone scooped out a bit of peanut butter and set it out for the chicken, who ended up with most of it stuck to his half-raw chest.
The old man leaned his back against the kiawe and began to tell Boone the story of Hawaii — the handsome men and women who had lived on the islands, the arrival of the Europeans, the stealing of the land, the fight for sovereignty.
After four beers the old man got up. “Better beer next time, man,” he said and walked off, the rooster following behind, a bit of peanut butter stuck on its breast.
Boone trimmed more bushes and mowed the landlord’s lawns, hitchhiked into town after a session at Rockpiles, and bought a six-pack of PBR and a package of sunflower seeds.
The old man and the chicken came back, nodding approval of the beer and the seeds, and the ancient told him about the proper way to enter and leave the sea, the way Mother Ocean sometimes allowed you back into her womb, and how you should never take that for granted because how often does a man get to return from where he came?
Over the next weeks, the old man and the rooster returned often, telling more stories of the gods that ruled the island, of Pele, and of what awaited those who did not pay respect to the ocean and the land.
Boone listened and felt something shift inside him. He felt the heartbeat of the soil on which he laid his head and the love of the ocean as she wrapped him in her waves. It was then he decided to never cut his hair.
One day, the old man arrived without the rooster, spit on the ground, and said, “Follow me.”
Boone got up and trailed him into the brush, asking where the chicken had gone. The old man rubbed his stomach, which Boone took to mean that either the man had eaten the flea-bitten bird or that it had succumbed to some kind of intestinal problem. He vowed to make an offering of peanut butter to a bird that had been noble, even in its suffering.
Boone followed the old man for more than an hour, over land that grew steep and rocky. When the rubber strap on one of his flip-flops broke, he tossed them into the brush, stepping in the exact places where the old man put his calloused bare feet. He was surprised at the lack of pain.
On a promontory that looked over the Pacific, the old man folded a small talisman into Boone’s hand and told him it had been given to him by Tūtū Pele — and that whoever held it and was pure would be blessed with peace and harmony. To those who were not pure, it would bring nothing but suffering and pain.
“That is all I have to say,” the old man concluded.
It wasn’t long after Jonah moved into the Pleasure Point house that trouble came. First, he lost his wallet and had to cancel all of his credit cards. Then his phone had fallen out of his back pocket on a bike ride. He bought a new phone but half of the numbers he transferred ended up without names attached.
The next day, he parked his BMW at Whole Foods and came back to find a grocery cart resting against its side. From the size of the dent in the rear passenger door, he figured someone must have let go of their cart the minute they walked out of the store and it had rolled unheeded down the entire slope of the parking lot until it swerved at the last minute and found his car.
No one left a note.
After that, he got a speeding ticket driving over Highway 17 and then a notice from the IRS that he was being audited. He was just telling himself that these were only blips in what had otherwise been a good life when a letter arrived from one of the big pharmaceutical companies. It threatened to sue him and his startup over software they’d written that used a simple blood test to determine, with 98 percent accuracy, if a drug would cause certain side effects without a patient having to experience the damage first. He thought of his sister who’d died at fourteen after a chemotherapy drug she took for her lymphoma caused her heart to fail, of how he believed the sale of his ridiculous dating app — four years before — would allow him to do something important with his life, like Bill Gates was doing.
And then there’d been this guy out in the water today.
He made himself a mug of coffee, plugged in his new phone to charge, and went out to the deck with a heaviness he hadn’t felt since his sister died. The wind was picking up.
Boone hunkered on the crushed-granite path and watched Jonah’s big gray house to see what Tūtū Pele would do. The first tendril of smoke came from an upstairs window an hour later.
He thought of Sandra and his son Nalu.
After she’d sold the house to the kook, Sandra had moved to Portland with their boy. By then, she and Boone hadn’t lived as man and woman for more than eighteen months. The first years were good, but then there had been too many arguments, too many times when she looked at him with pity. But they both loved the boy and so he had moved into the garage and built a small kitchen and a platform bed where he and Nalu watched The Lion King over and over while Sandra was at work.