Linda was different. Lopaka had to lure and bait her over a longer period of time, and even when he did strike, she'd been weakened more by the sudden disappearance of her friend Kia than by him. She didn't particularly wish to go with him that night. While many others followed him like stray dogs to their deaths, Linda did not go so peaceably. She fought. She hurt and even scarred him. She was more like Kelia in that way than any of the others. So, he wonders now, which Kelia is it to be tonight? The streetwalker or the liquor-store clerk who likes to peek at the dirty magazines?
Either way, he will be doing the work of gods…
He often daydreams on his route, even as he tells the tourists what they want to hear; it is one of his few pleasures. His daydreams surround his killing fantasy. He re-invents the moment of attack, binding the limbs, attaching them to the rack he has built especially to hold Kelia helplessly against the wall, a rack like that used by his father against those who broke the law in the village. He relives those dark-time moments with Linda, with Kia, with all the Kelias he has sent over to Ku and in whose destruction he has found gleeful satisfaction, far beyond sexual fulfillment, he assures himself, for with each killing he comes one step closer to his own godhood.
Sometimes his daydreams become inextricably mixed with memories; memories he'd just as soon forget, reshape or counterfeit, memories of hurt and humiliation so intense they must be forged anew if any of it is to make sense. Yet it was in those early years-even as an infant, humiliation and all-that he was first contacted by the running-wind gods to become their servant. The trade winds rocked his cradle.
Remembrance is painful and he hides from it always, yet it finds him, creeps into his daydreams, slithers into his bed, catches him at the wheel and at his weakest moments. Since he is unable to fully escape, a black and inky depression pours over his soul, blotting all else out. Childhood: No matter how he tries, his huge father finds him. His father still wants him to one day become him, but Lopaka has decided on another fate, one offered by a higher power than his earthly father. He escaped his father's tyrannical domination, escaped the place of his birth, the backward life of his youth, when his father sent him away, ostensibly to gain a deep, abiding understanding of the world through a Western education.
His freedom won, he found himself venting his pent-up rage on the unsuspecting in his midst, first on Maui, until his marriage to Kelia when, for a time, he was in control of his primal urges. Still, his angry father, never understanding the depths to which Lopaka had sunk, was enraged on learning that his son had married without consent or traditional ceremony. His father not only cut off all funds for him, but all contact as well, banishing him from ever returning to his island home of Molokai. He had dared to marry below himself, to marry a mixed-blood at that, to take a noanoa, a common peasant, for a wife. Hypocritically, the old man, chief of his puny tribe, had taken in a white woman, living in sin, giving birth to Lopaka, but she had been, according to his royal father, a “high-born haole.”
As a boy of four, he had seen his twin brother die when the ministrations and incantations employed by his father failed miserably to save the boy from a disease that had spread across their homeland. Lopaka, like his deformed brother, Lopeko, was infected with the contagion and very nearly lost his own life at that time. Often now, as in the past, he wishes it had been him whom the gods had taken.
He saw his brother's body taken away by the woman his father would later take as his second wife. He felt the flames of the fire as the little body of his brother was placed upon a stack of others and bumed. He cried out that his brother was still alive, that he could feel the flames scalding his living flesh; Lopaka had the welts on his body to prove it, but no one listened; they assumed it was the fever talking. Lopeko's bones were cast into the sea for fear they would contaminate the burial ground.
Later, as he grew older, Lopaka began to see his father's cruelty, hidden as it was behind a veneer of civility, law and custom, yet clearly present. He also began to slowly realize that his father and he did not look at all alike, and that his father was desperate to have more sons, to replace the misbegotten one, the one without the 'ele'ele, the luminous black color of the Hawaiian eyes, but rather with pale blue eyes, so it was not long before Lopaka realized that he was an embarrassment to his father, a defilement. That while he was the son of the mokoi, he'd been conceived by a haole who'd brought death and disease to the people. Lopaka's mother, too, had succumbed to the devastating disease which she had brought to the village.
His father's attempts to have more children became common knowledge, and everyone in the village spoke behind Lopaka's back about the evil the white blood in him had brought to the village, and how the chief could not possibly pass on his powers to this pale son.
An outsider who never fit in, he became a misfit at an early age, keeping to himself, living an all-but-mute existence, hearing not the voices of loving parents each night, but falling asleep to the whispered curses of anger, disappointment and distrust coming out of his own father.
For years he tried desperately to change his father's mind and the mind of the community, attempting to be him, mimicking the man, following him around like a dog, gazing up at him with admiration and feigned love. He wore the ceremonial lei and garb of the son of a chief, carried the ceremonial knives and clubs, and generally played the part fate had meted out to him in a pathetic attempt to win acceptance from everyone around him. At the same time, he secretly cursed his stepmother and asked the gods of the air and the earth to make her barren. Unable to have children, the stepmother was soon replaced by another, but she, too, could not give the chief another child, for Lopaka's evil magic was powerful. It was the first time the gods granted him his wish, and they opened his eyes to the true nature of his brother's death. It was a death that Lopaka knew in his heart had nothing whatever to do with the disease.
That healing lotion of his own brain that hid such horrors from the conscious child had placed the terror so far away that he'd lost all memory of it until the wind voices came to remind him. They opened his eyes to what his mind had closed on, that young, deformed Lopeko did not die of his illness but by the ceremonial sword belonging to his father. The gods told him that the hand wielding the sword had been his father's, that Lopeko had been an embarrassment to him.
No matter how he tried, Lopaka-a constant, brooding reminder to his father of all the taboos he'd broken-could never fit in, and in fact had good reason to fear for his own life; he was marked from birth and by the death of his twin, and there was no changing the public mind about him. There were other children in the village considered perfect, the epitome of the race, the last vestiges of it, in fact-children who were full-bloods, with rich smiles and warm, radiant 'ele'ele eyes that told of an ancient ancestry, their little bottoms and sturdy legs thick, their baby skin swarthy and their lives filled with freedom and happiness. And when one of their pet birds or dogs disappeared, found later to have been brutally slain with a long blade, it was held up as a warning to them to never tempt the demons of the night and the forests.
Lopaka's earliest memories of creating a state of non-existence in a living creature were now like the playful struggling and curiosity of a child over a complex jigsaw puzzle. Yet those first experiments in creating death where there had been life had stirred in him feelings and sexual emotions he'd never before touched. It was a kind of crude baptism for him, and his newfound religion quickly escalated when he began to lure smaller children into the forests, where he delighted in humiliating and hurting them, until one day a little girl named Alaya was found dead, her body brutally savaged and fed upon by the forest beasts and perhaps some supernatural demons known to lurk in the black shadows amid the mountains.