Driving the Saddle Road
When Ackerman got back from Honolulu we decided to lie low for a while. Even our fishermen friends at Huggo’s were getting nervous about why I was still hanging around, three weeks after Ralph left. The rumors filtering down—or up, as it were—from the real estate bund were beginning to take root all around us. I knew we had reached a breakpoint when even the bartenders at the Kona Inn began saying “I thought you left last week” every time I came in; or, “What kind of story are you really writing?”
“Never mind,” I’d say, “we’ll know soon enough.” It was my habit, at the time, to hunker down in the afternoon at the far end of the Kona Inn bar to read the newspapers and drink cold margaritas while I kept an eye on the scales across the bay— just in case I saw signs of a crowd gathering, which was usually the sign of a big one coming in.
From my perch at the end of the bar, with the big wooden fans whirling slowly above my head, I could look out on the whole waterfront. It was a good place to relax and read the papers—with the hula class practicing on the lawn, tall coconut palms along the seawall, big sailboats out in the bay and a whole zoo of human weirdness churning quietly all around me.
We were drifting into a macho way of life. There was no doubt about it. And no help for it, either. We were living with these people, dealing with them twenty-four hours a day on their own turf—which was usually out at sea, on their boats, mean-drunk by noon and never feeling quite comfortable with these tight-lipped seafaring bastards and all their special knowledge, being always in somebody’s way as the goddamn boat lunges along in the water. …
Forty thousand feet deep in some places, within sight of the Kona Coast. Eight miles straight down, like falling off a cliff. It would take a long time for a body to sink eight miles down to the ocean floor. It is pitch-black down there, absolute darkness.
Not even sharks swim that deep. But they will probably get you on the way down, somewhere in that hazy blue level around 300 feet, where the light begins to fade. Bobbing around on a boat the size of a pickup truck in 40,000 feet of blue water is not a good place to get weird with anybody, much less the captain of the boat. Or even a deckhand. Nobody at all.
These are the rules. You do what they say, no matter how crazy it seems even if the captain locks himself in the head below decks at nine o’clock in the morning with a quart of Wild Turkey while the boat runs in circles for forty-five minutes and the deckhand has passed out in the fighting chair with his eyes rolled back in his head like white marbles.
Even then, it is risky to question anything. These people are professional fishermen, skippers, licensed captains, and they take themselves very seriously. Words like “macho” and “fascist” take on a whole new meaning when you lose sight of land. Nothing will turn a man into a nazi any faster than taking a bunch of ignorant strangers out to sea on his boat, regardless of how much they pay. It is almost a rule of the sea, with these charter captains, that “the clients” will panic and do everything wrong at the first sign of trouble, so that is the way they play it; marine insurance is hard to get once you’ve lost a few clients overboard in water eight miles deep.
“Not one of you swine could get a job in the Caribbean,” I said one night to a table full of professional fishermen on the whiskey deck at Huggo’s. “You couldn’t even get work in Florida.”
Their reaction was sullen. The mood of the table went sour, and Ackerman called for the check. It was something like $55, which he paid with his Merrill-Lynch credit card while the others wandered off to look for fights.
“It’s time to leave,” I told him as we pulled out of the parking lot. “I’m losing my sense of humor.” “So are they,” he replied.
The traffic was bumper-to-bumper on Alii Drive, jammed up by a crowd of thugs who had swarmed onto the road to stornp the driver of a motorcycle that had gone out of control and plowed into a gang of surfers. There were forty or fifty of them, all crazy on marijuana.
I made a quick U-turn and aimed for the hotel, avoiding the madness outside. Moments later, from the balcony, we heard the familiar howl of police sirens.
Ackerman opened a new bottle of scotch and we sat down to watch the sunset. It was low tide, with no surf, and the melee out on the highway had cleared the rabble off the beach. It was time, I felt, to relax and ponder the sea.
Ackerman was smoking heavily. His face had taken on a sort of glazed appearance that made conversation awkward.
“Well,” he said finally, “let’s go to the volcano. They’ll never look for us up there.” He laughed and suddenly stood up. “That’s it,” he said. “We’ll make a run for the high ground, maybe run the Saddle Road.”
“The Saddle Road?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’ll like it. We can go for the record— one hour and seventeen minutes from Hilo to Waimea.”
“How far?” I said.
“Fifty-three miles, at top speed.”
When in doubt, bore it out.
—Harley DavidsonWe were coming into Hilo very fast, running downhill in the rain through a residential district at just under a hundred miles an hour. The speedometer went up to 180, but I was not in the mood for unnecessary risks at this point, so I hit the accelerator and shifted down into second gear. . . . Ackerman screamed something at me as a tin mailbox suddenly appeared right in front of us, but I missed it and punched the gas again as we hit the inside of the curve on a straight bounce and kept going. I had never driven a Ferrari before and it had taken me a while to get the hang of it … but now that I finally felt comfortable with the machine, I wanted to push it a bit, lean back and let it run. (Any car that costs $60,000,1 felt, was built for some special purpose—and until now I had not understood just exactly what this one had been built for, what it really wanted to do.)
The numbers on the speedometer had fooled me, for a while, into thinking that the Ferrari 308 was made to go fast. But I was wrong about that. A lot of cars will go fast, and I have driven most of them—-But I have never driven anything that I would dare to put through a five-mile stretch of downhill S-turns at 100 miles an hour in the rain on a two-lane blacktop highway from 10,000 feet above sea level down to zero in less than ten minutes.
The drop is so steep and so fast that every once in a while, at 100 miles an hour, you get an eerie sense of freefall. It is almost like flying, or falling off a cliff. All the outside noise fades away and your eyes feel big in your head and the focus gets very, very sharp.
We had already broken the record—or at least I thought we had—but I couldn’t be sure and Ackerman had gone rigid in the passenger seat, no longer keeping track of the stopwatch. He had been yelling numbers at me every ten or fifteen seconds for almost an hour, but now he was getting nervous. His eyes were wild and his hands were braced on the black leather dashboard. I could see that his confidence was slipping. What he wanted now was a handle, but that was out of the question. We had left all our handles at the top of the hill, in the shadow of Hilo Prison, two minutes ahead of the record and miraculously still alive.
Concentrate, I thought. Stay on the fall line, don’t touch the brakes, use the gears and don’t blink.. .. This is dangerous, we are almost out of control.
But not quite, and the car had amazing balance. It was finally on its own turf, functioning at the top of its form, and I didn’t have the heart to slow it down. Far out in front of us I could see, through the clouds, a white line of surf hitting up on the rocks around Hilo harbor. It stretched off in both directions like a line drawn with chalk, the lush green coast of Hawaii on one side and the deep gray swell of the Pacific on the other. The bay was full of whitecaps, and no boats were out … a bleak Sunday morning in Hilo, the capital city of the Big Island. The population is mainly Japanese, who tend to sleep in on Sundays, and not many of whom are good Catholics.
I had already taken this into account, along with other ethnic factors, when the Speed Run was still in the planning stage—-About six hours ago, in fact, when the bars closed in Kona and Ackerman let slip that he was planning to leave for a Tuna Tournament in Bimini the next day, or at least very soon . . . which alarmed me, because I had very definite plans to use his new yellow Ferrari to set a new land-speed record for running the Saddle Road.
June 4, 1981 Kona
Dear Ralph,
I am hunkered down in my place at Thug Central, watching the sea puppies out there on the break and running up huge bills while. I postpone my departure one day at a time and hang out like some
kind of funky Chinook drunkard up here on the balcony waiting for the big one to strike, like I always knew it would. .. .And I can almost smell the bastard now, circling out there, just a few feet away from the hook … but this time he’s acting different; this time I think he’s interested.
Things have changed since you left, Ralph. I shaved my head again, for one thing. And I also dropped out of sight. .. but not out of mind, at least not for Captain Steve. I call him constantly, about any problem or even any random idea that happens into my mind: Hunting wild pigs? Typewriter ribbons? Deep Diving on acid? Why is the Tanaguchi market out of Dunhills? Who rents jeeps? How far to the volcano? Where is Pele? How fast can a white man drive on the Saddle Road at sunset? Why am I here? Who has Da Kine? Where are the fish? Has Rupert called? Can you cash another check for two hundred? Why won’t Norwood return my calls about sacking the gravesites? Who was Spaulding’s mother? Why can’t you get a job?
Usually it is Laila who calls him to ask these questions. Which makes him doubly nervous, because in his heart he knows it’s weird. But he always returns her calls. And then she calls him back, for more details … so they spend a lot of time together, doing business and telling jokes.
And getting things done. Which frees my brain a bit and gives me time to focus. I type all night and prowl the roads by day, looking for Pele. She hitchhikes a lot, they say, usually in the form of an old woman. So I do a lot of driving and I pick up many hitchhikers, especially old women . .. but age is a hard thing to be sure of at 55 miles an hour; and the lazy shameful truth is that on any hot afternoon I can be found cruising Alii Drive in my T-top Mustang picking up women of all ages.
And I grill them, while we drive. Some of them can’t handle it: they weep, they lie, they sing along with the radio and show me their tits, and a lot of them swear they’re in love with me by the time we get to the Kona Surf parking lot.
That’s where I take them, no matter what they say or where they want to go. I take them all the way out to the end of Alii Drive and down the hill to that spooky little bay, and all the while I keep offering them a drink of hot gin out of a pint bottle with no top on it that I keep on the seat between my legs.
Most of them say they’ll do just about anything, just as long as it’s not drinking gin with a 200-pound bald psycho in an open car at high noon on Alii Drive or in the Kona Surf parking lot. Which is where I always dump them. Except for the ones who drink gin .. .
OK
H.S.T.