Chapter 4

It required only two hundred miles of cottony white clouds, as seen from several miles above a sparkling blue Pacific, for the three girls to become acquainted. Seated together on the starboard side of the aircraft, they made an interesting study in contrasts with Kalola's dark, exotic beauty, the blonde prettiness of Ellen Canfield, and Lynn, the vivid and vivacious redhead.

By the four-hundred-mile point, they had begun to tell each other their troubles.

"I saw your picture in the paper," Lynn sympathized with Ellen. "How terrible for you for your... her... husband to die that way."

Ellen regarded her blankly. Then her lazy, pretty mouth curled into a smile that was half sincere. "You mean like the papers said, from an overdose of 'L'? Bullshit, darling. Maxy fucked himself to death, and don't start thinking what a lucky girl I was either. The son of a bitch didn't screw himself into the next world on me. He got tired of me after the first week. All I did after that was hustle for him to keep him in bread."

"Men are dirty bastards," Kalola put in, her eyes slitting and her lips forming a hard, bitter line. "I will never be nice to another man. I will take them for everything I can get from them... after I have made them screw me, of course."

"My own experience with them has not been so good," Lynn confessed. "My own husband divorced me for no better reason than because he happened to catch me playing with his best friend's cock. Now, mind you, we hadn't done a thing. It was at a party and we'd all been drinking. I'd been dancing with this man and he got a hard-on, and all I did was take it out and stroke it a little."

"And they think they're so superior," Kalola snorted, "the narrow-minded, nasty, selfish bastards!"

Ellen nodded in sympathetic agreement.

"What will you do in the islands?" Kalola asked her.

Ellen shrugged and looked vague. "I don't know. I hear there's a nice hippie colony out on Oahu. Max had two kilos of pot stashed away. I sold it for enough to get a plane ticket. I still got a half a kilo and a dozen tabs each of LSD, mescaline and speed. That'll get me by for a while."

"You're better off than I am," Lynn said. "That cheap brother-in-law of mine gave me only three hundred dollars. I guess I'll have to find me a little grass shack on the beach and live off of bananas."

Kalola looked at her pityingly. "Boy, you malihini wahines sure got plenty to learn. If you find a grass shack anywhere, it will be on top of a high-rise apartment building and cost you two hundred bucks a month. They catch you swiping bananas they put you in jail and forget they got you in there."

"What is a malihini wahine?" Lynn asked.

"Wahine is girl," Kalola replied, "and malihini is newcomer... like tenderfoot or greenhorn. You'll be lucky to find an apartment at all. I've got friends who live in what we call 'The Jungle.' That's the poor people's district off the main street in Waikiki. Sometimes you can get an apartment there for a hundred a month... you pay the gas and lights."

"Why don't the three of us try to find one together?" Lynn suggested. "Wouldn't that be fun?"

"Sure," Kalola agreed, "but I don't know what we'll do for a living. You don't know anything but teaching school, and I guess I can't get a job dancing... not after walking out on my contract in San Francisco."

"Why don't we all turn pro?" Ellen asked. "Seems to me, with all the rich tourists and other squares there, we ought to make out okay by whoring."

"Probably have to," Kalola agreed.

"I wouldn't mind," Lynn said. "But maybe there's a better way. I have a very good camera with me, and I'm something of an amateur photographer. We can probably rig up a darkroom to develop our own pictures. What I had in mind was blackmail. We pick out an important man and one of us brings him to the house. When you both have your clothes off and things are getting real interesting, one of the others can take the pictures. With infra- red film you don't even have to have light."

The other two looked at Lynn with suddenly increased respect.

"Maybe you're not so malihini after all," Kalola said. "Okay, I'll go see Joe Moto when we get to Waikiki. Maybe he's got a house for us."

It has been said that the most charmingly Polynesian part of Oahu is the International Airport at Honolulu. That this atmosphere is deliberately and not too subtly contrived detracts not one whit from the validity of the statement, for the rest of the island is even more commercial, more of a tourist trap, and even phonier.

Not that this meant a thing to Kalola. She was used to it and expected nothing else. From the time the plane came in sight of the crater of Haleakala on Maui, and then swung north to pick up Diamond Head, she was happy because she was home. She didn't need to hear the canned strains of "Beyond the Reef" to become misty-eyed. The familiar scent of plume ria or pikake was enough to strum the strings of her sentimental heart.

Ellen glanced disinterestedly about her with that bored and blase attitude she considered most proper and becoming to a hippie.

Lynn, on the other hand, was full of "ohs" and "ahs" and behaved in the normal, rubberneck fashion of the typical tourist. She had to be steered firmly by souvenir stands offering koa ashtrays, ersatz grass skirts, ukeleles and numerous other items... most of which had been made in Japan.

They took the airport bus to Kalakaua Avenue and were in the heart of famed Waikiki, although all they could see of it were the fronts of huge hotels, apartments, stores and honky-tonk spots.

"Isn't there supposed to be an ocean around here someplace?" Lynn asked, disappointed.

"Oh, sure," Kalola replied. She waved a hand to the west. "Somewhere out there beyond the hotels... if some mainland real estater hasn't drained it and started a new sub-division. Come on. We go find Joe Moto." She led them down Lewers Street and turned on Kuhio Avenue, stopping in front of an ancient frame building with a faded sign on its porch. The sign depicted a sick-looking palm tree. Beneath this time-worn cutout could be seen the name, "Pacific Paradise Hotel." The grounds were shaded by kukui trees and the moist, warm air was cloying with the sweet scent of frangipani. Behind the office they could see, half hidden by the lush, tropical growth of shrubs and flowers, a number of small shacks that leaned awry on crumbling foundations.

A bandy-legged, squat and swarthy man with squinted slits of eyes and a bald, bullet-shaped head, came out at Kalola's call. He stood on the front porch, picking his teeth with a match stick and regarding the three girls dubiously. "You come back, hunh?" he greeted Kalola. "You want house now. Who these other wahines?"

"Friends of mine," the little dancer told him. "Come on, Joe, fix us up with a place. We plenty damned tired."

"I dunno," Joe said. He was eyeing Ellen, taking in her flowered pants and the medallion hung between her large breasts. "We don't want no hippies. Big trouble from cops alla time."

"Boy, you sure dumb," Kalola rejoined scornfully. "All rich tourists from mainland dress hippie style now. Anyway, Ellen no make you trouble. She damn good, hard-working whore."

"Oh," Joe Moto said. "Why didn't you say so? Okay, take number four. It ain't locked." He started back into the house. "Rent went up again while you was gone," he said. "You pay one- twenty a month now."

"Jap sonomobeech!" Kalola muttered under her breath as she led the two girls to number four. The two bedroom house was permeated by the musty smell of mold and of rotting timbers. It was permanently occupied by countless cockroaches, cane spiders bigger than the inside of a tea cup and small lizards of all colors.

"Is it a house or a goddamned zoo?" Lynn asked plaintively as she looked for a spot free of insect life where she might deposit her suitcase.

"You'll get used to 'em," Kalola assured her. "Let's go swimming."

They changed into bathing suits and walked the shaded streets to the beach, a small semicircle of sand between two hotels and crowded with people. They swam in the warm water and played in the almost negligible surf, then stretched out on the beach to take the sun.

"Who should we start on?" Lynn asked as she wiped suntan lotion on her gleaming thighs. "I mean where do we start looking for a blackmail victim?"

"Wouldn't just whoring be simpler?" Ellen questioned, but Kalola ignored her. Her forehead was wrinkled in thought.

"Hey!" she exclaimed, "I bet I know who we can take. Mike is running for state senator. He's got a thing about blondes. With election coming up, he'll be a cinch. You want to try him, Ellen?"

Ellen shrugged. "Why not? The islands seem a funny place to be making it with an Irish politician... but what the hell."

"He's not Irish," Kalola explained. "His name is Mike Fuda. He's jap. I can introduce you to him."

"Let's go home then," Lynn suggested. "I want to see about turning that closet in my bedroom into a darkroom, and I have to figure out where I can hide and get a shot of him and Ellen."

"You chicks go ahead," Ellen said lazily. "I'm gonna stay on the beach awhile."

"Okay," Kalola agreed, "but be right here where we can find you later. Soon as Lynn gets everything set up, I'm going to call Mike Fuda and make a date for you. Mike goes for blondes like a monkey goes for peanuts. He'll start at your toes and eat you up."

Ellen shrugged. "I don't mind getting eaten. There was a queer kid in San Francisco who'd come up to the pad every day to eat my pussy, until that damned Max started charging him."

After the other two had left, Ellen slept for a while. She awoke and sat up to light a cigarette and stare dreamily out at the flat, shimmering expanse of blue that was the Pacific. She felt no particular thrill at the knowledge that she was in the Hawaiian Islands. To her, a beach was a beach and an ocean was just a hell of a lot of water. Had Max not upset her life by dying, she would as soon have been back in the dark, familiar confines of the room they had shared in the building a block off of Haight Street, San Francisco. When she thought of the many friends, of both sexes, who had come there to make love to her on the semen-stinking, urine-soaked mattress, she grew homesick and wished she had not come to the islands in the first place.