Cut Off (5 page)

Her approach to the woman's estate was heralded by the bark of her dogs and the pungent aura of their feces, which Helen kept in a neat midden pile, but was so voluminous Tristan could smell it from two blocks away. A pug and a lab trotted up to greet her, sniffing her; a half dozen others yelped and wagged from behind the fencing Helen had extended across three properties.

Even with the fencing, it was never clear which dogs Helen owned and which ones she merely assisted. Then again, the woman herself wasn't easy to define, either. Alerted by her pack, she met Tristan in the front yard carrying a koa wood staff topped by a ferocious tiki mask. Kukui nut necklaces swirled and clacked around her thick neck, crushing the purple flowers of a fragrant lei. A red and white Hawaiian dress flowed over her ample body. Tristan had long ago given up trying to deduce whether these were ironic exaggerations of a woman who'd decided to have some fun with whatever was left of her life, or the genuine expression of Helen's love for the islands. Most times, Tristan thought it was both.

Helen crushed Tristan to her expansive chest. "What brings you out? Run into another stray?"

"Not of the canine variety." Tristan jerked her chin downhill toward the town lining the coast. "Yesterday, I ran into someone claiming to represent the 'Guardians of Lahaina.' Never seen him or heard of them before. Wasn't entirely friendly."

"This is your first encounter with them?" Helen favored her with a chiding look. "Girl, you need to get out more."

She walked up to the porch to sit in the shade. As soon as she had a lap, a Maltese vaulted into it and stared at Tristan, its tear-lines streaked red.

"They first showed up...four months ago? Five?" Helen waved a hand-woven hala leaf fan at the side of her face. "Docked at the marina one morning and immediately went house-hunting. I believe the patriarch, such as he is, said they had fled violence on Oahu. Four of them, initially, though a few of the locals seem to have become rather taken with them as well."

"How dangerous are they?"

"The Guardians?" Helen laughed, gazing down into town. "To your virtue, perhaps. If you're worried about them hurting you or your brother, I've heard nothing regarding violence."

"It's a bluff, then?"

"I didn't say that. You never can tell. For now, though, they seem civilized enough, in their way."

Tristan thanked her and headed home, catching up to a sweating and frustrated Alden. After they got the cart home, they took a day off to rest, then began to lug everything up to the hidden bowl in the woods.

She'd grabbed a post hole digger, and other than the massive amount of labor involved, setting the posts was one of the easier parts of the project. They had a pile of eight-foot 4x4s which she decided needed no cuts at all. They dug holes and planted the faded redwood, packing the vivid soil tight around the bases.

Once they had three in place, forming a corner, Alden stepped back. "Kind of crooked."

Tristan bunched her collar and wiped the sweat from her neck. "Do you want to go back for a level?"

"Think we need one?"

"I think if you're that worried about it, you better start walking. Anyway, I think they'll tighten up once we've braced them with the...beams. Lintels. Whatever."

They dug holes for another post on each side of the corner and pounded in more 4x4s. She measured the gaps between posts, which weren't quite as wide as she'd intended them to be, then propped a 2x4 across a couple of yet-to-be-used posts, marked them up, and cut them with a hand saw.

This took much longer than she'd expected and left fine sawdust glued to the sweat-beaded hairs on her forearms. Reddish dirt stained the seams of her skin. Her clothes were sweat-soaked and filthy. She felt disgusting and yearned, for the billionth time, for a real shower. She rested in the shade to cool down, inasmuch as that was possible, then got back to work, trying to think of her body as a shell, as a kitchen counter that could be wiped clean once the meal was finished.

She wedged the feet of the ladder into the dirt and Alden handed her the cut 2x4. She laid it over the tops of the posts and discovered it projected past the edge of the last one. Miraculously, though the board had required a single measurement and a single cut, she had managed to fuck it up.

Alden squinted up at her, face damp with sweat. "Something wrong?"

"Our foreman's incompetent." She flushed and threw down the board. It hit the dirt with a wooden twang.

"Hey!" Alden danced away, flinging out his arms. "What's the matter with you?"

Wordlessly, she picked up the board, set it over the pair of 4x4s she was using as a work platform, measured again—she still didn't know how she'd messed it up, but it was obviously long by three-plus inches—and got sawing. She already knew what had set her off. She had grown up a Golden Child. Straight-A student who excelled in every extracurricular she'd tried, from soccer to the trivia team. Salutatorian. She'd nailed her first choice of college, and continued to stay near the top of her class despite the hyper-competitive environment that came from being
surrounded
by people like her.

That background was the main reason why her impending graduation from Berkeley into apparent joblessness had thrown her for such a loop. It was also to blame for why one mis-measured board made her want to rub her face in the dirt and don a hair shirt.

And it had to stop.

It was a
shack
. Which they would only need in case of emergency. And would quickly abandon in favor of more permanent shelter. In the larger context, they lived in a climate where the very "need" for shelter was debatable. It was nice to have a place to get away from the rain, wind, and bugs, but they'd be fine sleeping on blankets in the open air.

Time to quit berating herself over these mistakes. To quit trying to be perfect and start learning how to get better. No one else was going to get this done if she didn't.

With her frame of mind successfully altered, she climbed up to resume work on the frame of the shack. Alden passed her the board and stepped back dramatically, mock-cringing. She snorted and set the 2x4 across the posts. It fit. Alden handed her a heavy carpentry hammer and galvanized nails. She pounded them in, the rap of the hammer pulsing through the woods.

They fell into a rhythm. As Alden dug holes and set 4x4s, she measured boards and secured them to the posts. By late afternoon, she was exhausted and filthy, but they had a skeleton in place, an 8'x16' outline. It was neither perfectly square nor perfectly straight, yet it was there, it was standing on its own power, and Tristan couldn't help feeling proud of herself.

"Should put on the roof tomorrow," she said. "Assuming I have the strength to lift a hammer."

He nodded, gazing at the frame, mouth open in the enduring grimace of someone who's pushed their muscles past the point of comfort. "When this is done, we're going to owe ourselves a lot of chocolate."

They trudged home. Somehow, Tristan found the strength to scrub off the dirt. The next day, she nailed corrugated tin panels to the roof as Alden dug holes for the aluminum posts of the fence/camouflage/lanai. Once the roof was done, she hammered plywood between the posts. With each sheet gobbling up such a big piece of the wall, and few necessary cuts, she was able to enclose the shack so fast she still hadn't figured out what to do with the doorway: go and get a real one with hinges and a knob and such, or seal up the hole with plywood, to be pried loose if and when they had to put the place to use.

Sore and tired from the previous day of construction, they knocked off early. At the house, Tristan went to the garden and plucked two cucumbers to fill out the "mash," a medley of guava, avocados, mangos, bananas, cantaloupe, and squash. It tasted fine on its own, but it had only taken them two bouts of food poisoning sans modern plumbing to get extremely serious about their spices, which acted as natural preservatives. To the fruits and vegetables, they typically added combinations of cayenne pepper, cumin, salt, black pepper, white pepper, turmeric, cardamom, fennel, garlic powder, and anything else that might add a little variety. She made a mental note to be sure to include all of the above in the cache at the shack.

She rinsed the cucumbers and took them to the kitchen to chop them up. The sun was taking its leave and she glanced up to watch it tumble below the horizon. Once it was gone, bits of red remained: not just on the clouds, or the flowers of the overgrown bougainvillea, but on the mail box. The flag was up.

"Alden?" she said.

No reply. Was probably outside bathing or using the last of the daylight to pick avocados or taro; they had discovered the hours between sundown and bed time to be the most frustrating (too dark to do much, yet too early to sleep), and tended to fill them with menial, unskilled tasks like mashing poi or sweeping up. Feeling foolish, she took the holstered pistol from the counter and walked outside.

The yard was vacant. She walked down the dirt path to the mail box, had another look around, lowered the flag, and opened the flap. She had never used it since moving in and it squeaked loudly. Inside, a white envelope sat on the ribbed floor of the box. It was addressed to "THE GIRL ON THE MOUNTAIN."

Annoyed by the usage of "girl"—she was 27—she took a last glance down the road and headed back to the house, wriggling her grimy thumbnail under the envelope's flap. She closed the front door and bolted it and sat at the kitchen table.

Alden walked in a minute later, toweling his hair. "What's that?"

"A summons."

"A summons? Like, to a quest? Do we have to dump a ring into the cracks of Mount Kilauea?"

She slid the letter across the table. "To pay taxes. To the 'Guardians of Lahaina.' And to explain why we didn't when ordered to do so by one of their appointees."

He picked up the letter, scanning the haughtily formal lines. "Why should we? Because they say so?"

"Depending on what they want, it might not be a bad idea."

"To knuckle under?"

"Beats a gunfight."

Something hard rested in the center of his voice, like the pearl in an oyster. "You're the one who's always saying authority is ultimately derived from itself and can only exist as far as you allow it to. I thought the whole reason we're hiding away in the hills is to prevent ourselves from getting dragged into another Hanford."

She rubbed her face. She was exhausted and could barely bring herself to read the letter, let alone process it. "Do you really think Hollister would have sent us a sternly worded letter? I'm going to feel them out. If they're as soft as they seem, we could be better off playing their game than fighting or running."

They ate mash and cucumbers, did what few chores they could stand to do after the day at the shack, and went to bed early. Tristan wanted to get this business with the Guardians over with as soon as possible, but they had summoned her for the "afternoon," so when she woke, she wandered down to the beach in the early light. The island of Molokai hung on the right half of the horizon, a tall green ridge from one end to the other. Before her, the sand was yellow, the ocean electric blue. Waves hissed up the beach.

She stripped off her shoes and put them in her little backpack and ran north past the vacant hotels and the mangrove-esque trees that crowded the edge of the sand. She tried to run at least three times a week. Housework, gardening, and walking/bicycling everywhere would probably have been enough to keep her reasonably fit. But she wanted to know that, if she needed to, she was capable of running for ten miles straight.

This was probably paranoid, and given the activity of the last week, she hardly needed the extra exercise. It didn't matter if she needed it. The key to human behavior was that the more you did something, the easier it became to do. When she'd been doing kung fu every day, it was strange to
not
do kung fu that day. Then she'd sprained her elbow and each punch and block hurt—and anyway, island life had been calm for months—and she'd stopped for a while, and discovered that meant she had stopped for good. Now and then she ran through the forms to be sure she remembered them, but that was about it.

Ridges of volcanic rock poked from the coarse sand. She angled closer to the water, a frothing surge rolling over her ankles. She slowed her pace, splashing, then returned to the tideline where the sand was firmest.

The elbow injury was when she'd started running instead. She enjoyed the beach and it allowed her to better learn the island's layout. There was a mental side, too. Coming to the beach every other day made her feel dedicated. Executing her ability to run for miles on end made her feel accomplished. Continuing to push herself a little farther, week by week and month by month, made her feel like there might not be a limit to what she could achieve. Add it all up, and it left her feeling powerful, mighty, a force to be reckoned with.

She wanted to bring that feeling with her today.

She made it all the way to the rocky horn enclosing Oneloa Bay before turning around and making her way back through the abandoned wasps' nests of the condominiums. She didn't stop until she was back at the hotels. Beside the stagnant swimming pool, overlooked by its water slide, she slowed to a walk, breathing hard, sweat dampening her hair on the back of her head. Once she was home, she ate, cleaned up, and readied her standard travel kit: food, water, first aid, pistol, rifle, knives.

"I shouldn't be gone longer than four hours," she said on her way to the door.

"If you're not, at what point should I charge in Rambo-style?"

"As soon as you can work your way up to Stallone's pecs."

She headed down the mountain to the highway and followed it into town. The letter had requested she deliver herself to Sands, a former bar and seafood restaurant on the waterfront. The letter included directions. Nice piece of condescension, considering the Guardians had been in Maui less than half a year.

A column of smoke rose from the other side of town, but it looked like a cook fire, nothing out of place. She crossed the parking lot outside a mall that had once sold jewelry and Hawaiian clothes and knickknacks and snorkeling tours. Palm trees stood in stillness, brown fronds littering the concrete around them. A hotel shuttle bus had come to a stop across the sidewalk, its tires flat, windows streaked with dust, doors gaping open. As she passed, a black cat ducked beneath it. Tristan's hand jerked to her pistol.