The Curse of Lono - By Hunter S. Thompson Page 0,52

needed a break. The tension was running high. We had been there too long and the locals were getting nervous. The real estate bund had been worried from the start about the harmful effects our story might cause in their market, and our horrible experience in the Jackpot Tournament had done nothing to ease their fears.

And neither had we, for that matter. My own mood, in the aftermath of the fishing tournament, was too foul to hide. Captain Steve was drinking heavily, Norwood had gone into hiding, the beach thugs were still chasing Laila, and Ralph's sudden departure for London -- leaving, as he did, in a highly visible wake of shame, failure and public humiliation -- was a sure sign to even our friends that whatever we finally published would not be good for business.

Which was, after all, the whole point. That had been understood from the start -- although not properly, by some people -- and the business of Kona is business. Specifically, the selling of real estate. There are 600 registered realtors in the KonaCoast alone, and the last thing they need right now is an outburst of bad publicity in the mainland press. The market is already so overpriced and overextended that a lot of people are going to have to go back to fishing for a living, if things don't change pretty soon. The bull market of the early Seventies is just another Hawaiian legend now, like the hubris of Captain Cook.

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, 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