Chapter 5 The Man #2
It was partly true. She had an idea for a book, and journals and notebooks full of notes, but had never quite started. A memoir. But first she needed to remember.
“A Hemingway type, huh? That’s gotta be the best spot for writing. No one around for miles to bother you.”
Minnow felt her right cheek heating up and sensed someone at the far end of the bar listening in on their conversation. But
she kept her eyes on George, who was about to pour some cream into the coffee.
She held up a hand. “Black, please.”
He motioned toward the back table. “Care for any food, then? You look like you could use some plumping up.”
It was true. Since breaking it off with Max, she had lost seven pounds on her already thin frame. Still, she hated when people
pointed it out.
“Thanks, but I have to get going.”
“Not without our famous mango muffins. Woody would never forgive me. I’ll pack a few to go for you so you can grind ’um later,”
he said, taking off for the kitchen.
Minnow turned slightly to see where the boat was but instead made eye contact with the man at the end of the bar. He looked
to be alone and had a newspaper spread out in front of him, which he quickly glanced back at. She tried to look away but found
that she could not, and stood rooted to the floorboards. His gold-tipped hair came out of his hat in loose pieces, and his
face was dusted in freckles. The way he stared at the paper, a little too intently, made her think he wasn’t really reading
it, merely pretending to.
Then he looked up at her again and fixed his eyes on hers. Yellow-green, like kelp on a sunny morning. She felt like she was
being studied, the same way she would have studied a new species of shark or any number of undersea creatures.
“Hey,” he finally said, no smile.
“Hi.”
He wore a long-sleeved T-shirt, red surf shorts and rubber slippers, and seemed out of place. Maybe he was a lifeguard, early
for work.
“What’s your book about?” he asked.
The question caught her off guard. “My book?”
“You told George you were writing a book.”
She laughed self-consciously. “Oh, right. Well I haven’t actually started it yet, I’m still in the brainstorming phase.”
“What’s it about?” he asked again, not rude but not friendly.
His face was all angles, as though whittled by the wind. And he was handsome. The kind of handsome that usually came with
a boatload of trouble.
“A memoir. About my life,” she said, grasping at words and wondering where her brain had gone. “Nothing that interesting.”
One side of his mouth lifted ever so slightly. “Sounds like a guaranteed bestseller.”
The way he said it, all sleepy-eyed and nonchalant, irritated her. “Actually, I think it could be a bestseller, not that it’s
any of your business.”
She turned to leave, but her eyes caught a word in bold at the top of his newspaper.
Shark.
He tracked her eye movement and held up the paper, as if for her to see.
Shark Hunt on Table.
Minnow stepped closer. “Excuse me, would you mind if I have a quick look at your paper?” She practically snatched it out of
his hands and scanned the front page. No mention of Angela Crawford, at least there was that.
State and county officials weigh in on the possibility of a shark hunt in the wake of deadly attacks on the Big Island’s Kohala Coast. It wouldn’t be the first time sharks have been targeted in the aftermath of an attack.
From the late fifties to the mid-seventies, close to five thousand sharks were culled in attempts to make Hawaiian waters safer.
The tally includes 554 tiger sharks, the second most common shark responsible for attacks on humans, after the great white.
“We need to make sure our waters are safe,” Mitch Hamada, head of Tourism Authority, said. “And if there are sharks on the
loose with a taste for humans, that won’t be good for business.”
She stopped reading, disgusted. “They have no fricking idea,” she said, handing back the paper. “Thanks.”
“The sharks or the Tourism Authority?”
There was no sarcasm in his tone, and she realized it was an honest question.
“Actually, both.”
“Have you been following the story?” he asked.
“Yeah, I read the papers. Why?”
For some reason she was still bothered by his off-the-cuff bestseller comment and wanted to get out of here and back to the
boat.
“It just seems like a visitor staying in the middle of a bloody triangle might want to know what’s lurking out there,” he
said.
“Last I checked, sharks live in our oceans. Big sharks, little sharks, old sharks, new sharks. And they do not lurk, they swim. Because if they stop swimming, they die.”
He looked slightly amused. “Sounds like you have an opinion about it. I like that. Too many people these days are incapable
of thinking for themselves.”
Now she was curious. “Do you have an opinion about these shark incidents?”
He held his mug with both hands, as though he needed to be warmed up. He stared into it for a while, then said, “Not really.”
His whole demeanor changed and she wondered why. Then George returned with a plastic bag full of goodies.
“You come back anytime, and tell Woody, if he ever shows up, that Uncle George says aloha and to come on ovah.” Then he leaned closer and lowered his voice. “By the way, did he tell you what Hale Niuhi means in Hawaiian?”
“No, what does it mean?”
George stepped back, fiddling with his mustache. “I think better he tell you. There’s a story behind it.”
Of course now she was dying to know, but there was no time for stories and George seemed like a long-winded kind of guy. She
thanked him and left, juggling the coffee and muffins and her towel, which kept slipping down past her hips. When she reached
the edge of the sand, her head half turned back to the bar. The man was watching her. Her heart ramped up a few beats, and
she turned away before she could do anything stupid, like smile.