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  Joseph recoiled. “Fuck.”

  “Dey not dat big. C’mon.”

  “Do they have to be naked?”

  “Wot difference?”

  Joseph considered that. There was no difference. Nothing was going to make this any easier.

  “You get the feet.”

  They carried the first body, a thin, reedy guy with a bushy mustache and sandy hair, cut in a kind of seventies style with the hair coming halfway over his ears. Joseph thought the guy might’ve believed he looked like a bad-ass Texas Ranger type, but he really looked more like a car salesman. They lowered his body onto the hot rocks, and the skin instantly began to spit and sizzle. Joseph and Wilson both covered their noses.

  Without a word, they went back and got the second body. This guy was big, almost as big as Wilson. Wilson let out a grunt as they hoisted him.

  “Dis cat used steroids.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “White guys don’ get dis big.”

  Like his partner, the big guy had a bushy mustache. Wilson didn’t know what to make of that. Maybe they were in a cult.

  Joseph and Wilson struggled with the second guy, eventually laying him next to the hole and rolling him in. A burst of steam rose out of the pit as soon as the body hit the hot rocks.

  They quickly got to work finishing the imu, throwing wet banana stalks on top of the bodies and then rolling more white-hot rocks on top of that. These rocks they would keep replacing with other rocks from the fire, rotating them to keep the imu as hot as they could for the next ten or twelve hours.

  Joseph walked to the shade of the banyan and collapsed in a heap. He was soaked through with sweat, red dirt sticking to his hair, his face, his arms and legs, his chest, and his back. His sweat had turned the dirt to mud; the sun was starting to bake it into clay. From a distance he looked like one of the mud men of New Guinea: a ferocious clay-coated island warrior. A mud-caked cannibal.

  Wilson walked to his van and pulled a couple of cold beers from a cooler in the front seat. He carried them back and handed one to Joseph without a word. Joseph gratefully took the beer, cracked it open, and felt the cold bitter taste wash the dust out of his throat.

  The two cousins sat together in the shade, drinking their beer, watching the smoke rise up from the imu and drift in the wind.

  ...

  Joseph had been dreaming. He’d dreamed he was on a raft at sea. In every direction there was no sign of land, no sign of another boat, nothing. Just big, blank vastness. It was a moonless night, or at least in the dream he didn’t see anything as comforting and normal as the moon. The sky was clear and starless. The ocean rocked with malevolent swells, the dark waves churning with jellyfish, pololia, the water almost solid, like black glass, with sharp jagged edges.

  The raft wasn’t a Robinson Crusoe job—it wasn’t bamboo lashed together with vines—it was one of those yellow rubber inflatable things that fishing boats and pleasure yachts keep for emergencies. Joseph bobbed up and down in the waves, unable to move, trapped in the marshmallowy rubber like a man drowning in a condom, a grubby prophylactic spinning and swirling as it’s flushed down the toilet.

  Joseph woke up and blinked. The sky was warming, the morning sun somewhere off to the east, just cresting over the sea. Birds flitted from branch to branch in the banyan tree above him. Joseph didn’t need a shrink to analyze his dream. He knew what it meant. Something bad was hiding under the black waves, something that was sucking him down, keeping him stuck in place. It was obviously an anxiety dream. But the jellyfish: What did that mean?

  He cranked his head to one side and saw Wilson snoring on a blanket.

  “Fuck.”

  Joseph jumped up and moved quickly to the fire. It had been Wilson’s turn to watch the imu, so Joseph was relieved to find it still hot, the rocks still cooking. Joseph took a stick and bent over the pit. He poked at some of the meat, watching as it fell away from the bone, white, steamy, and tender. Just the way a kalua pig is supposed to look. Alarmingly, his stomach let out a ferocious growl. Somehow, in the night, the horrible stench of burning hair and roasting flesh had turned into—well, it smelled like bacon.

  Joseph shuddered and walked back over to his sleeping cousin. “Wake up.”

  Wilson rolled, rubbed his eyes, and groaned. “What’s it?”

  “They’re done.”

  Wilson sat up. “You check?”

  Joseph nodded. “Yeah.”

  “How dey taste, brah?”

  “Stop fucking around.”

  Joseph turned, walked back to the van, and began pulling out long kitchen tongs and large metal pans. Wilson joined him.

  “I need coffee. I no can fo’ wake up.”

  Joseph didn’t respond; he just kept pulling out stuff, organizing the work that had to be done.

  “Serious, brah.”

  “I don’t have any coffee.”

  “Let’s go into town, get somethin’ fo’ breakfast.”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Get somethin’ to take out, den. Dere’s gotta be someplace fo’ grind near da freeway. I’ll stay an’ make work.”

  Joseph thought about it. He realized Wilson was right. They’d probably be here another four or five hours; they’d need some food.

  “All right.”

  “Right on. Get me two—no, three—breakfast san’wiches an’ two extra-large coffees wit’ milk an’ sugar. I need lotsa sugar.”

  Joseph brushed himself off and started to get into his truck.

  “An’ some fries. Fo’ later.”

  “Make sure they’re all the way done.”

  Wilson saluted as his cousin drove off, jouncing down the red dirt road.

  ...

  Joseph headed back toward the sugarcane fields with several bags of takeout riding on the seat next to him. Even at this early hour he’d had to wait in a line of cars in the drive-thru as commuters grabbed their steaming sacks of the fried egg, pork sausage, mayonnaise, and molten-cheese sandwiches before taking the Kamehameha Highway to the H2, racing into Honolulu like it was the Indy 500.

  A couple of papayas, picked up at a roadside stand, tumbled around on the floor. Joseph rolled his window down, letting the cool morning breeze blow in and carry the stench of congealing grease out the window, across the ocean, and back to the mainland where it came from. He looked at the bags on the passenger seat. The paper was growing incrementally darker, wicking the grease from the bottom to the top of the bag. It reminded him of his youth.

  He’d spent his childhood eating grease. Raised on the “plate lunch,” a deep-fried chunk of protein, a scoop of macaroni salad, and two scoops of rice, Joseph had gone through his adolescence and early adulthood constantly overweight. He hadn’t been big enough or strong enough to use his weight as a defensive lineman like his cousin, so he spent much of his time sitting under a tree reading books, eating potato chips, and listening to Hawaiian pop singers like Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole.

  In retrospect he realized it hadn’t been so bad. Sure, he felt left out and lonely, but then he was the only person he knew who’d read Proust’s body of work in one summer-long marathon. He didn’t go to the prom or to the school football games; instead he would go to the library and, if he found an author he liked, he’d work his way through their collected works. Steinbeck, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain: He devoured them.

  When he discovered pulp fiction, it got worse. The Hardy Boys led to Mickey Spillane, to Raymond Chandler, to Ross MacDonald, and on and on. He’d read a book a day, sometimes forgetting to sleep. Paperbacks rose like stalagmites next to his bed, reaching toward the ceiling, collapsing into heaps, collecting like snowdrifts in the corners of his room.

  This sedentary lifestyle came crashing to a halt one day. Sitting in his underwear on an examining table at the ripe age of seventeen, weighing in at a robust 275 pounds, a well-worn library copy of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in hand, Joseph heard the doctor tell him abou
t the “Hawaiian diet.” It was based on one simple fact. The Polynesian body had developed for centuries subsisting on a diet of roasted fish, greens, fruits, and taro root. The introduction of oils, and in particular the hypersaturated fats used in fast foods, had caused a weight explosion among islanders because their bodies couldn’t process the stuff. They just didn’t have the chemistry.

  So Joseph began his freshman year at the University of Hawaii the same way he ended his senior year of high school: sitting by himself, reading a book, oblivious to the ebb and flow of pheromones and hormones, the pitch of tight biceps, or the pull of a heaving bikini top. Only now he was intensely interested in food. He began reading cookbooks, searching for new ways to cook things. And his diet changed drastically. Instead of a bag of potato chips or a cheeseburger, he ate fresh papaya and pineapple; instead of steak or meat loaf, he ate fresh fish. Sometimes he’d go for days only eating raw foods: sashimi and melons. Other days he might roast fresh seafood on the beach, just like his ancestors.

  It didn’t take long for his body to adjust. The weight dropped off him, like peeling out of an oversized suit, and he soon found himself filled with a strange new energy. He began walking everywhere, walking for hours. He’d let his mind drift on these walks, daydreaming. Occasionally he’d find himself strolling on the beach with a large boner rising up inside his pants like the periscope of a submarine reaching through the murky ocean toward the bright light of day.

  If his life was like a book, something he could easily relate to, then Joseph thought of his early years as one chapter, the greasy lonely chapter, and his college years as the next.

  When he was younger he never paid much attention to girls and, for their part, they never paid much attention to the pudgy little nerd with his head in a book. So he had never done the things that drive most adolescent boys crazy. He’d never been to a school dance and held a girl close while a cover band blared some crappy ballad by Billy Joel and his penis throbbed like an outboard motor in his pants. He’d never felt the ache and pang of a first crush, never experienced the flush of adrenaline, the bloom of blood rushing to his face as he played Spin the Bottle around a fire pit on the beach, never knew the awkwardness and excitement of a first date.

  In his sophomore year of college, all that changed. He chose to major in something called Hawaiian Oral Traditions, because he liked stories and thought someone ought to remember how to speak Hawaiian. When he wasn’t jogging on the beach or hanging around the campus learning, through trial and error, his way around the female anatomy, he was working. He got a job in a restaurant, starting out as a dishwasher and working his way up to prep cook and then line cook. Even though it wasn’t necessarily the healthy Polynesian food he himself ate, Joseph enjoyed preparing all kinds of things—even the goofy dishes that the tourists craved, like macadamia-crusted opakapaka with mango salsa or pork braised in haupia milk.

  With the responsibility of employment came some financial freedom. Joseph found himself with more spending money than most college students, and he invested that money in his culinary education. He’d take women out on dates, but only to restaurants he wanted to try. He ended up becoming something of a regular at Alan Wong’s. He’d sit at the counter facing the kitchen and watch the cooks throw together a kind of inspired mélange of tropical, French, and Japanese.

  It was during these dinners that he realized what he wanted to do. He wanted to be a chef.

  His dates didn’t understand. Why didn’t he want to sit at a table and look into their eyes? They wanted to talk to him, to tell him what they were interested in, what things they liked to do, what they thought about others. They wanted to find things in common. They wanted to communicate.

  Joseph didn’t want to talk, he wanted to cook.

  ...

  He swung his truck off the main road and turned back down the rutted red trail. He drove slowly, creeping along between the sugarcane, so as not to make too big a rooster tail of dust.

  As he pulled into the clearing, he looked over and saw Wilson, squatting near the smoldering imu, a human leg on the ground in front of him, picking meat off the thigh, putting it in his mouth, and chewing thoughtfully.

  ...

  Joseph jumped out of the truck. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Wilson looked up, his mouth still full of freshly roasted human flesh, and held up a finger. “Wait a sec.”

  Joseph stood there, feeling a bubble of stomach acid rising inside him, and watched as his cousin finished chewing and swallowed.

  “Are you insane? You can’t eat people!”

  “I just wanted a taste.”

  Joseph turned and retched. Bitter fluid spewed out of his stomach and onto the ground. Feeling his knees go weak, he collapsed, letting the red dirt rise around him, and began to cry quietly.

  Wilson looked at him. “I just tasted it, brah. Don’t freak.”

  Don’t freak? That’s all he wanted to do. He’d been doing all this, digging the imu and cooking the corpses, on a kind of autopilot. He hadn’t felt anything toward the two men: not hatred, not pity, nothing. But now, seeing Wilson squatting on the ground munching on a thigh? “Don’t freak” was kind of an understatement.

  He looked up.

  “That’s a person’s leg. A human being. You can’t eat a human being.”

  “Yeah. But, like, when am I ever gonna get a chance to try dis again? You know wot I’m sayin’? It’s not like it’s gonna be on the menu at Sam Choy’s.”

  Joseph didn’t say anything.

  “It’s not dat bad. A little stringy.”

  “You’re an Ai-Kanaka.”

  “Dat’s just a story.”

  Joseph wiped tears from his eyes. “Those stories come from somewhere.”

  Wilson shook his head. He looked down at the leg still steaming on the ground. Joseph thought he saw a strange look flicker on his cousin’s face. Not a look of revulsion or repulsion at what he’d done. No. It was the look of a young boy staring at the cookie jar. A look desperate for one more taste.

  Joseph jumped up. “Stop. Just—fucking—stop!”

  Wilson looked hurt. “I stopped, okay?”

  “Move away from that leg!”

  Wilson stayed put and looked up at Joseph. “I’m sorry, okay?”

  Joseph got up and walked shakily back to the truck. He reached into the cab and pulled out the bag of fast food.

  “Here.”

  “All right!” Wilson leaped to his feet and stuck his face in the bag. “I was starvin’, brah!”

  He pulled out a breakfast sandwich—a cold, congealed artery bomb coated with mayonnaise, decorated with two strips of fat-marbled bacon, and smushed between two English muffins—unwrapped it, and took a huge bite. He held it out for Joseph. Joseph looked at the sandwich and at his cousin, who was chomping relentlessly, little blobs of mayonnaise and grease squirting out the side of his mouth; then he looked over at the leg on the ground. Cooling now, it was beginning to attract flies. Joseph shook his head.

  “You gotta eat somethin’, man. We got a lotta work ahead of us.”

  Joseph sat on the bumper and watched as a fly landed on the leg and began doing its fly thing. He wanted to give up, to surrender, just lie down and sleep until someone came and arrested him. Let the authorities lock him away or, better, treat him like the old Hawaiians treated an Ai-Kanaka and pitch him off a cliff to his death. He watched as another fly landed on the leg. He heard his cousin’s lips smacking wetly as they worked over the breakfast sandwich. A bird chirped.

  “It’s not dat bad.”

  “What’s not that bad?”

  “Wot we did.”

  Joseph looked at Wilson. “It’s bad, okay? There’s nothing good about it.”

  The anger in Joseph’s voice made Wilson defensive.

  “Dey were gonna do it to us.”

  Joseph nodded. What could he say? Yeah, they were going to do it to us. We were just defending ourselves. Protecting the islands, defending our oh
ana, our way of life. We aren’t murderers and cannibals, we’re just scaring the conquerors away with some Polynesian craziness. Knocking them off before they take our land and destroy our culture, just like they did to the Cherokee, Crow, Shawnee, and Navaho. Yeah. We’re innocent. We’re just keeping them from corrupting our culture.

  But Joseph wondered about that. How innocent were they? How justified? Who was really responsible for corrupting the culture? Out of necessity the natives had converted their culture into a commodity and sold it so they could afford to live in their own homes. But had they sold out or become subjugated? Why were they spending all their effort and energy welcoming the conquerors, serving them pineapple and poi, offering them leis and mai tais, giving them the spirit of aloha, when what they’d really like to do is feed them to the sharks?

  What was the alternative? Should they just give the island land to the haoles and let them turn it into golf courses? Speak only Hawaiian and keep to themselves? Was it better to live in squalor on a reservation than become an Ai-Kanaka? What does it mean to be Hawaiian?

  Wilson was well into the second sandwich. He looked at Joseph.

  “You gotta eat, brah.”

  Joseph wiped some dust off his sunglasses. “I had some papaya.”

  Joseph watched Wilson sitting there, devouring a sandwich as a couple of corpses steamed in the imu next to him. He hung his head in dismay. Maybe it really was time to walk away from paradise. Maybe it wasn’t paradise anymore.

  The Story Begins

  Two

  “Put your pussy right in my face.” Strobe lights flashed. Raunchy hip-hop music scratched and throbbed. The lap dancer, encased like a sausage in a fishnet bodysuit, moved up and down, in and out, simulating some kind of strange mix of musical chairs and fucking. She twitched and swiveled around the chair as the old man stared at her, his body listing to the left like a sinking ship. His pale blue eyes bugged out of a face tanned tobacco and leathery from years in the Nevada sun as they watched her curvaceous ass sling from side to side. He licked his thin, chapped lips, feeling the scraggly whiskers of his mustache hanging down, and shifted in his seat. Using his right arm he moved his left arm out of the way. He reached up and adjusted his bolo tie, a large chunk of turquoise embedded in a web of Indian silver. While his left hand was limp and unadorned, his right hand sported several chunky gold rings and a Rolex watch that was so expensive it might have been made from plutonium.