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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Shark food
>>Kona
Hoisting the shark that had interrupted Daren Guy's memorial service, the winch strained, the motor groaned, the cable creaked. The crowd seemed to hold its breath as the numbers ticked by at an alarming rate. "That's it," Robert Yee finally said. "13.5 feet and 1,865 pounds."
Danno Kaleikini, a strapping teenager with wild shoulder-length hair, stood up on a stepladder and with a long, gleaming knife slit open the stomach.
As some in the crowd pulled back, Cruz MacKenzie stepped through an opening to get a front-row look. Danno pulled open the incision with a gaff and probed inside. A tangle of bloody decaying matter tumbled out of the shark's gut and landed on the pavement with an unexpected thud.
The stench was nearly overwhelming. Cruz covered his nose and mouth with his sleeve and gulped.
Danno poked at the goo with the gaff and lifted a bone. "It's a thigh bone!" someone yelled.
The crowd gasped together. Sonya Chan, Daren's fiancee, lurched toward the water, lifted her veil and vomited into the harbor. A school of tilapia gathered for a feast. Cruz couldn't reach Sonya through the crowd.
But an old man -- the same guy from Wet Spot -- rushed to her side and offered Sonya a pink handkerchief. Through the crowd, Cruz saw her take the handkerchief. He spoke to her, she looked up, in apparent shock. The crowd surged for a better look at the bone and Cruz lost them for a moment. When he spotted Sonya again, the old man was gone and Sonya was clutching the handkerchief to her lips.
"That's just a pig bone, probably a boar, not a human's," Robert Yee announced.
Danno probed at the open gut and pulled out a chunk of rotting meat, small fish bones and scales, a humuhumunukunukuapua'a head, an empty tallboy can of Budweiser, a bit of lobster shell, but nothing remotely human.
"Hold it!" shouted red-bearded fisherman Danny O'Brien. "This means the one that got Daren is still out there!"
"I say we get it," hollered his friend Ikaika Fernandez, "before it kills again!"
"Yeah!" several people shouted.
As some fishermen ran for their boats, others headed for Kona Kai Fishing Supply, while people who had been in the back of the crowd rushed forward to look at the shark. Caught in a swirl of bodies and vigilante spirit, Cruz finally broke free of the the crowd. When he reached the dock, Sonya's dinghy was already 50 yards from the dock. He yelled, waved, to no avail.
And Cruz suddenly had a new story. He'd gone to bed last night with a lead in his mind for the memorial service story. Fortunately, flying by the seat of his pants was one of the things did best.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com
