Hawaii - James Michener [566]
"I always side with the dispossessed. You know, Immanuel Quigley got into great trouble in Ohio, aiding the Indians."
"I'm sorry I wrecked your book about Quigley. Will they be angry ... at Smith?"
"The biography of one man is the biography of all men," she said. "In the passage of time, Kelly, we all become one person."
"Do you honestly think a kanaka like me is as good as a haole like you?" he asked.
"I was once taught that if a pebble falls in the Arabian desert, it affects me in Massachusetts. I believe that, Kelly. We are forever interlocked with the rest of the world."
She saw that he was sleepy, so she cradled his sun-browned shoulders in her lap, and he asked for his guitar so that he might play a little slack-key, and he picked out melodies that spoke of the sun-swept seashores that he loved. After a while the guitar fell from his hands, and he dozed.
Elinor, watching the panorama of sandy beach and palm trees, studied with interest what she thought was the changing of the tide, for the ocean waters seemed to be leaving the shore, until at last they stood far out to sea disclosing an emptier reef than any she had seen before, and she watched certain prominent puddles in which large fish, suddenly stranded, were whipping their tails in an attempt to escape. She began to laugh, and Kelly, forgetting where he was, asked drowsily, "Whassamatta you laff?" And she explained, "There's a fish trapped in a pool." And he asked, "How da heck he stuck in dis ..."
In horror he leaped up, saw the barren reef and the withdrawn waters. "Oh, Christ!" he cried in terror. "This is a big one!" He grabbed her in his strong arms and started dashing across the sand, past the useless Chevy convertible and on toward higher land, but his effort was useless, for from the tormented sea the great tsunami that had sucked away the waters to feed its insatiable wave, now rushed forward at more than five hundred miles an hour.
It was not a towering wave but its oncoming force was incredible. It filled the reef. It kept coming relentlessly, across the sand, across the roads, across the fields. In low areas it submerged whole villages, but if it was not constricted and could spread out evenly, its destruction was moderate. However, when it was compressed into a narrowing wedge, as at the mouth of a valley, it roared in with accumulating fury until at last it stood more than seventy feet higher than along its accustomed shore.
In its first tremendous surge inward it trapped Kelly Kanakoa and Mrs. Henderson in their snug valley. It did not whip them about, like on ordinary breaker, for it was not that kind of wave; it merely came on and on. and on, bearing them swiftly inland until Kelly, who knew how awful the outgoing rush would be, shouted, "Elinor! Grab hold of something!”
Vainly she grabbed at bushes, at trees, at corners of houses, but the implacable wave swept her along, and she could hold nothing. "Grab something!” he pleaded. "When the wave sucks back out . . ."
He was struck in the neck by a piece of wood and started to sink, but she caught him and kept his head above the rushing waters. How terrifying they were, as they came on with endless force. She was swept past the last house in the village and on up into the valley's tight confines, the most dangerous spot in the entire island from which to fight a retreating tsunami, for now the waters began to recede, slowly at first, then with speed and finally with uncontrollable fury.
She last saw Kelly almost unconscious, hanging instinctively to a kou tree upon whose branches she had placed his hands. She had tried to catch something for herself, too, but the waters were too powerful. At increasing speed she was sucked back over the route she had come, past the broken houses and the crushed Chevy and the reef she had seen so strangely bare. As the last stones whipped past she thought: "This cursed island!" And she thought no more.
Now the drowsy life of the beachboy drifted from day to day, from week into week, and then into sleepy sun-swept months; the years of sand