My Kind of Town
My Kind of Town
One sane thought
>> Waimea Bay
Huge, thundering waves and the courageous young surfers who dared to take them on in The Eddie were a wonderful diversion from the hell her personal life had become, and as Meg Choy Primitivo reclined on the crowded beach she was privately debating whether 28-foot waves or walls of molten lava were the greatest display of nature's majesty. It was the sanest thought she'd had in weeks, and fortunately didn't require an answer.
The sun felt good as she stretched out on her orange Mauna Kea towel, so lost in thought she didn't notice wishful glances from shirtless young men half her age, or the testosterone in the air when they passed. In the last year she had been so deprived of love and touch by her husband, she couldn't believe herself desirable anyway.
But she was having fun, and joined the crowd on the beach shouting and cheering and screaming every time a surfer paddled onto a wave and stared down its steep face into a moving abyss of blue terror. Meg didn't know their names when they were announced, other than Andy Irons after seeing him on the cover of MidWeek, but they were all fantastic.
And while she cheered them all, she joined the crowd in pulling especially for the local boys. One of them, Chookie Boy Kulolo, was amazingly daring. Or as three young guys behind her kept shouting, "That's insane!" She also joined a moment of silence for Eddie Aikau, as well as for Mark Foo, who was being inducted posthumously into the Big Wave Hall of Fame.
But just a moment, because the waves were growing bigger, and Eddie and Mark would have been the first to say "Let's go already!" Surfers were just paddling out when Meg's cell phone rang. It was Jake Peepers, P.I.
"We got him dead," he said.
"Meet me by the showers."
She left her towel, wrapping a black pareau around her black swimsuit as she hurried up the beach. She saw him at a picnic table opening a laptop computer. He motioned for her to sit beside him. "I'm downloading the images. And I have to warn you, this is going to be hard. I've done this before, it's always hard."
"I understand." Meg said, trembling.
On the screen 50 image icons popped up. "OK, here we go," Peepers said, clicking on the first icon. Up came gray fuzz. "What the ...?" The second image was also gray fuzz, and the 48 after that. Meg Primitivo did not pay him a $1,000 retainer for this. "I don't know what to say," he said.
The announcer said the next heat was about to begin, and it included Chookie Boy. She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him toward the beach.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com