Page 56 of Eruption
“I’m telling you, they’re gearing up for the Big One,” Lono said.
“You decided that because of what youthinkyou heard?” Duke asked.
He was the biggest of their group, and he looked older, a tight end and linebacker on the Hilo High varsity football team. He was rocking a Mohawk haircut.
“Iknowwhat I heard and what I saw,” Lono said. “These guys arescientists. They know what they’re talking about.”
“Haolescientists,” Dennis said.
“Right,” Lono said. “Got it. Because you’re native, so maybe we should call you akama‘ainameathead instead of just a plain old meathead.”
Moke gave Lono a playful shove toward the water. “C’mon,you think the Big One is coming when somebody’s car engine makes a loud noise,” he said.
Lono shook his head. His friends either weren’t listening to him or just didn’t want to believe it. Maybe because they were high-school kids and it was too perfect a morning on the Big Island for them to worry about anything except the waves they were about to catch.
“I told you the same thing before Mauna Loa blew a few years ago,” Lono said.
“And we’re still here, aren’t we?” Dennis asked.
“I’m telling you, they were talking about somethingloabig,” Lono said. “Andloabad.”
“My grandmother always told me that eruptions are just the Earth’s way of speaking to us,” Dennis said.
Lono,kama‘ainalike his friends, knew all the myths and legends about volcanoes, the way old people like Dennis Lee’s grandmother thought of them as powerful living creatures who were not to be interfered with for fear of their response.
“Mykupuna wahine,” Moke said, referring to his own grandmother, “tells me that eruptions are a way that the Earth is reborn.”
“Until one comes along and kills us all,” Lono said.
“Hey, are we gonna surf now?” Dennis asked Lono. “Or do you want me to take you home so you can hide under the covers and wait for your mommy?”
Before Lono could say anything, the sand underneath their feet began to shake so hard that the boys were afraid the beach might open wide and swallow them up.
He and his friends ran with their boards under their arms, but not toward the water.
They ran away from it.
Moke dropped Lono and Dennis off at Dennis’s house, and the boys sat on the small couch in Dennis’s living room trying to ignore the tremors that were still coming every few minutes, like rolling thunder.
They tried to play Dennis’s new video game Riding the Lava, but they gave up when the walls of the small ranch house refused to stop shaking, both of them finally tossing their controllers onto the coffee table.
“When I was little and it got like this,” Dennis said, “I used to tell my mother to make thehekiligo away.”
The native word for “thunder.”
Lono somehow managed a smile, despite the nerves that were tying his stomach in knots. “So where’s your mom when we need her?” Lono asked.
“She left for the office before Moke picked me up this morning,” Dennis said.
“She’s working on a Saturday?”
Dennis’s mother was the assistant to Mr. Takayama, the head of Civil Defense in Hilo. “She said big things were happening,” Dennis said.
“The Big One is happening, that’s what,” Lono said. “Whether you want to believe me or not.”
The house shook with the biggest jolt yet; it felt like there had been a lightning strike on Dennis’s block.
Dennis Lee looked at Lono. “They’ve always stopped before,” he said. “Why won’t they stop today?” He grabbed his controller from the coffee table, pointed it like a gun in the direction of the big living-room window, and furiously pressed buttons.