Final Hour (Novella) Read Online Free

his birth certificate had Roman numerals after it and imposed upon him a weight he had no desire to carry. When still a child, he insisted on being called Pogo. He had escaped the expectations of his family by quietly pretending to be a simple soul of limited intellect, concealing his passion for books, scoring a consistent 2.0 in his schoolwork, remaining in character for so long that the greatest actors of stage and screen would have admired his performance.
    “Sometimes,” he told Makani, “I feel bad about deceiving them. Then I think about a life of country clubs, imported cars, vacation homes, five-star restaurants—and I break out in a cold sweat.”
    She shrugged. “They love you the way they think you are, and you love them. That’s as good as families get.”
    “Which reminds me—where’s Bob?”
    “On the dock. He likes to hang his head over the side and watch for fish.”
    Pogo nodded. “I’m like the Bob of my family. So…what’s got you so torn up?”
    “How do you know I’m torn up?”
    “I can’t read your mind, O’Brien, but I can read your face.”
    She watched a serrated formation of brown pelicans slice the sky and leave no scar.
    A young couple oared past, standing up on paddleboards, perhaps headed all the way to the back bay.
    Makani was never silent just for effect. Her silence must mean that what was on her mind had a terrible weight.
    Pogo was the pattern of all patience. He gave her time.
    * * *
    Makani took small sips of her beer until she had finished half the bottle.
    White sails raised on mainmast and mizzen, but for the moment motoring toward the harbor entrance and the open sea, a fifty-foot ketch passed, and she yearned for the freedom it represented, a freedom that her paranormal gift might never allow her.
    At last she said, “If I tell you about it, you’ll say we have to do something.”
    “You touched somebody,” Pogo guessed. “You saw something bad.”
    “Story of my life.”
    “Whether or not I say ‘Do something,’ you’ll do something.”
    “I don’t have to.”
    “You don’t have to, but you always do.”
    “This one scares me.”
    “You’ve been scared before.”
    “Maybe not like this.”
    “Who was he?” Pogo asked.
    “Not he. She.”
    “She who?”
    “This hot blond psycho in the park along Ocean Boulevard.”
    “How hot?”
    “Some guys, the thought of doing her would melt the fillings in their teeth.”
    “Can you hook me up with her?”
    “Not funny, Gilligan.”
    The last thing Pogo, the ideal California surfer boy, needed was a girl to pursue. In his case, they were the pursuers, and he was the pursued, a truth he seemed loath to acknowledge. He found his good looks to be an annoyance, in part because those drawn to him solely because of his appearance tended to be tiresome.
    He was such a handsome guy that Makani could think of no word adequate to describe him. Even the Hawaiian language, with its tendency toward lyrical hyperbole, lacked the words. He wasn’t merely
nohea
or
maika’i.
Hua-pala kumu
didn’t say it, either. When someone’s good looks had an element of sexual appeal, it would always be expressed poetically, through metaphor, with reference to rain or mist or spray, as Hawaiian had no word meaning
sexy.
In Pogo’s case, the closest she could come to describing him was to resort to the word
glory
as a synonym for male beauty:
Hanohano Pali-uli i ka ua noe,
which was said of handsome men and meant
The glory of Pali-uli is the misty rain
. Pali Lookout was the most dramatic place in the islands: a spectacular thousand-foot cliff at a low point in the Koolau Mountains, where the trade winds rushed through with tremendous force. But as far as Makani was concerned, even the great power of tropical rainstorms and fierce wind combined with the thrill of a thousand-foot drop did not convey the effect Pogo had on her the first time she saw him—or the ten-thousandth, for that matter.
    If he could have read her