“Maybe.”
“How many in this troop?”
“Don’t know. Maybe six or eight. just a guess.”
“You bought a shotgun. You think they’re dangerous?”
“Maybe.”
“Have You reported them to anyone? Like animal control?”
‘No.
“Why not?”
Instead of answering me, he hesitated and then said, “Pia’s driving me
nuts.”
Pia Klick. Out there in Waimea for a month or two, going on three
years.
I didn’t understand how Pia related to Bobby’s failure to report the
monkeys to animal-control officers, but I sensed that he would make the
connection for me.
“She says she’s discovered that she’s the reincarnation of KahaHuna,”
Bobby said.
Kaha Huna is the mythical Hawaiian goddess of surfing, who was never
actually incarnate in the first place and, therefore, incapable of
being re.
Considering that Pia was not a kamaaina, a native of Hawaii, but a haok
who had been born in Oskaloosa, Kansas, and raised there until she left
home at seventeen, she seemed an unlikely candidate to be a
mythological uber wahine.
I said, “She lacks some credentials.”
“She’s dead-solid serious about this.”
“Well, she’s way pretty enough to be Kaha Huna. Or any other goddess,
for that matter.”
Standing beside Bobby, I couldn’t see his eyes too well, but his face
was bleak. I had never seen him bleak before. I hadn’t even realized
that bleakness was an option for him.
Bobby said, “She’s trying to decide whether being Kaha Huna requires
her to be celibate.”
“Ouch.”
“She thinks she probably shouldn’t ever live with an ordinary dude,
meaning a mortal man. Somehow that would be a blasphemous rejection of
her fate.”
“Brutal,” I said sympathetically.
“But it would be cool for her to shack up with the current
reincarnation of Kahuna.”
Kahuna is the mythical god of surfing. He is largely a creation of
modern surfers who extrapolate his legend from the life of an ancient
Hawaiian witch doctor.
I said, “And You aren’t the reincarnation of Kahuna.”
“I refuse to be.”
From that response, I inferred that Pia was trying to convince him that
he was, indeed, the god of surfing.
With audible misery and confusion, Bobby said, “She’s ‘so smart, so
talented.”
Pia had graduated summa cum laude from UCLA. She had paid her way
through school by painting portraits; now her hyperrealist works sold
for impressive prices, as quickly as she cared to produce them.
“How can she be so smart and talented,” Bobby demanded, “and then .
.
.
this? ” “Maybe You are Kahuna,” I said.
“This isn’t funny,” he said, which was a striking statement, because to
one degree or another, everything was funny to Bobby.
In the moonlight, the dune grass drooped, no blade so much as trembling
in the now windless night. The soft rhythm of the surf, rising from
the beach below, was like the murmured chanting of a distant, prayerful
crowd.
This Pia business-was fascinating, but understandably, I was more
interested in the monkeys.
“These last few years,” Bobby said, “with this New Age stuff from Pia
.
. . well, sometimes it’s okay, but sometimes it’s like spending days in
radical churly-churly.”
Churly-churly is badly churned-up surf heavy with sand and pea gravel,
which smacks You in the face when You walk into it.
This is not a pleasant surf condition.
Sometimes,” Bobby said, “when I get off the phone with her, I’m so
messed up, missing her, wanting to be with her . . . I could almost
convince myself she is Kaha Huna. She’s so sincere. And she doesn’t
rave on about it, You know. It’s this quiet thing with her, which
makes it even more disturbing.”
“I didn’t know You got disturbed.”
“I didn’t know it, either.” Sighing, scuffing at the sand with one
bare foot, he began to make the connection between Pia and the monkeys:
“When I saw the monkey at the window the first time, it was cool, made
me laugh. I figured it was someone’s pet that got loose . . . but the
second time I saw more than one. And it was as weird as all this Kaha
Huna shit, because they weren’t behaving at all like monkeys.”
“What do You mean?”
“Monkeys are playful, goofing around. These guys . . . they weren’t