The Cursed Canoe

Chapter Two

The women in Emma's crew hosed the boat down and hauled it into the halau. The paddlers worked quietly and dispersed quickly, leaving the four of us—Pat, Emma, Yoshi, and me—on the dark beach.

You might imagine a Hawaiian sunset as a florid blaze over the water, edged with pinks and golds, but here you would be wrong. Those sunsets happen on the west side of the island, the dry sunny side that draws all the tourists. Here on the rainy windward side, the sky darkens and the palm trees become black silhouettes, and it's nighttime. If you really want to see something, stand on the beach at dawn. When the rising sun lights the ocean, then creeps up the forested slopes rising up from the shore, and finally illuminates the snowy peak of the volcano...well, I've heard it's spectacular. I don't usually get up that early myself.

"One minute everything's fine," Emma fumed, "an' next minute she falls into the water in front of me. No warning at all."

I seemed to be the only one who was feeling the cold. Emma was fairly incandescent with rage. She seemed to think Kathy Banks had keeled over on purpose, specifically to ruin paddling practice.

"Was she breathing when they took her out of the water?" Pat asked.

"How should I know?" Emma crossed her sturdy arms. "Sherry and Pam were the ones who pulled her up. That was all we could do. None of us had a phone out there. Man, I knew something like this was gonna happen."

"Cause of the diet?" Yoshi asked.

"You put your crew on a diet?" I was glad I had resisted Emma's attempts to persuade me to join her crew. The thought of daily workouts was bad enough, but a diet on top of everything else sounded downright totalitarian.

"No, I did not put anyone on a diet. I mean, I might have told 'em that we could all stand to lose a little weight."

A chill breeze sliced through my loose knit angora sweater. I hugged myself and rubbed my upper arms.

"Can't you eat whatever you want?" I said. "With all the exercise you guys do?"

"You don't want extra weight in the boat," Emma said. "You gotta be light so your boat rides higher in the water. That way there's less drag, and you go faster. But look, I did not encourage this. In fact, I told them, you can't train on five hundred calories a day."

"Five hundred calories a day! Plus hours of paddling? You guys are like galley slaves. How does anyone think this is fun?"

"Molly, when you start paddling with us? Once you're out on the water? You'll understand."

"No," I said. "That is not going to happen."

You can't equivocate with Emma. You show any hint of indecisiveness, and she'll steamroll right over you.

"I mean, when the Labor Day Race is over," she said. "Right now I'm dealing with seven crew members and only six spots in the boat. Everyone wants to race, so it can get a little ugly."

"Can?" Pat said. "Looks like it already has."

"We call it paddletics," Yoshi said. "When paddlers get too competitive within their crew, and turn on each other."

Yoshi has mellowed a lot since he first moved here with Emma as a freshly minted MBA. At first, he didn't like living in Mahina. He claimed there were no decent jobs to be had, and would say things like, "I can't live in a place where no one can tell I'm wearing a two thousand dollar suit."

Tired of his grumping around the house, Emma got him into canoe paddling, which he embraced with the zeal of a convert. Most of his time is now spent paddling and hanging out at the beach. Today he wore board shorts, a souvenir t-shirt from the previous year's Labor Day canoe race, and a cap with the logo of a local paddling shop.