Chapter 34

Honoli‘i Beach Park, Hilo, Hawai‘i

From where he stood on the Hilo beach, a place he'd begun to think of as his own private beach, Lono Akani watched with awe—there was no other way to describe it—as the cool members of the Canoe Club knifed across the water in their long boat.

Lono and his three friends were out here this early on a Saturday morning because Dennis Lee had checked the surf forecast the night before and promised them that this was when the waves would be fastest-breaking, with just the perfect chop in the water for the best possible rides.

But the guys rowing in the distance, they were training like they did almost every day, getting ready for the all-island regatta coming up in June, getting after it while Lono and Dennis and Moke and Duke ate the doughnuts they'd picked up in town.

Dennis had made them stop at Popover because he said there was no way he was surfing on an empty stomach.

"Your brain might be empty," Moke told him, "but your stomach hardly ever is."

Lono was barely listening. His eyes were focused on the rowers. It wasn't just awe that he felt; there was something else, something more—a powerful sense of envy at the teamwork he was witnessing. Mac liked to tell them that he thought of his surfers as a team, but Lono knew better. In surfing, it was every man for himself.

Lono had called Mac this morning to ask if he wanted to come watch them. But that was just his cover story. A head fake. With everything he'd seen and heard at HVO yesterday, Lono hoped that if he pressed hard enough, Mac might tell him what was really going on.

Mac didn't answer his phone, though, and Lono didn't leave a message.

So they'd come to surf without him for a change. While they waited for the waves, Lono told his friends about what had happened yesterday at HVO and how Mac had blown him off when he tried to ask questions about it.

"I'm telling you, they're gearing up for the Big One," Lono said.

"You decided that because of what you think you heard?" Duke asked.

He was the biggest of their group, and he looked older, a tight end and linebacker on the Hilo High varsity football team. He was rocking a Mohawk haircut.

"I know what I heard and what I saw," Lono said. "These guys are scientists. They know what they're talking about."

"Haole scientists," Dennis said.

"Right," Lono said. "Got it. Because you're native, so maybe we should call you a kama‘āina meathead instead of just a plain old meathead."

Moke gave Lono a playful shove toward the water. "C'mon, you think the Big One is coming when somebody's car engine makes a loud noise," he said.

Lono shook his head. His friends either weren't listening to him or just didn't want to believe it. Maybe because they were high-school kids and it was too perfect a morning on the Big Island for them to worry about anything except the waves they were about to catch.

"I told you the same thing before Mauna Loa blew a few years ago," Lono said.

"And we're still here, aren't we?" Dennis asked.

"I'm telling you, they were talking about something loa big," Lono said. "And loa bad."

"My grandmother always told me that eruptions are just the Earth's way of speaking to us," Dennis said.

Lono, kama‘āina like his friends, knew all the myths and legends about volcanoes, the way old people like Dennis Lee's grandmother thought of them as powerful living creatures who were not to be interfered with for fear of their response.

"My kupuna wahine," Moke said, referring to his own grandmother, "tells me that eruptions are a way that the Earth is reborn."

"Until one comes along and kills us all," Lono said.

"Hey, are we gonna surf now?" Dennis asked Lono. "Or do you want me to take you home so you can hide under the covers and wait for your mommy?"

Before Lono could say anything, the sand underneath their feet began to shake so hard that the boys were afraid the beach might open wide and swallow them up.

He and his friends ran with their boards under their arms, but not toward the water.

They ran away from it.

Moke dropped Lono and Dennis off at Dennis's house, and the boys sat on the small couch in Dennis's living room trying to ignore the tremors that were still coming every few minutes, like rolling thunder.

They tried to play Dennis's new video game Riding the Lava, but they gave up when the walls of the small ranch house refused to stop shaking, both of them finally tossing their controllers onto the coffee table.

"When I was little and it got like this," Dennis said, "I used to tell my mother to make the hekili go away."

The native word for "thunder."

Lono somehow managed a smile, despite the nerves that were tying his stomach in knots. "So where's your mom when we need her?" Lono asked.

"She left for the office before Moke picked me up this morning," Dennis said.

"She's working on a Saturday?"

Dennis's mother was the assistant to Mr. Takayama, the head of Civil Defense in Hilo. "She said big things were happening," Dennis said.

"The Big One is happening, that's what," Lono said. "Whether you want to believe me or not."

The house shook with the biggest jolt yet; it felt like there had been a lightning strike on Dennis's block.

Dennis Lee looked at Lono. "They've always stopped before," he said. "Why won't they stop today?" He grabbed his controller from the coffee table, pointed it like a gun in the direction of the big living-room window, and furiously pressed buttons.

"What are you doing?" Lono asked.

"Trying to pause this," Dennis said.

He was the funniest kid of all of them, the one who didn't take anything seriously, except maybe the girls at Hilo High. But Lono could see the fear in his eyes now—he wasn't even trying to hide it.

Lono tried to remember the excitement they'd felt an hour before when they'd gotten to the beach and the whole morning was spread out in front of them.

But that feeling was gone.

Lono realized something as the walls of the small house started shaking again: The Earth wasn't just talking, the way Dennis's grandmother said it did when the thunder came up out of the ground this way.

It was shouting at them and refusing to stop.