Elmer McFarthingale should have been pleased and greatly relieved at the way things went, at least during the initial hour of the luau. The food was superb, the two native orchestras magnificent, and the series of singers and dancers outdid themselves. Even the punchbowl was very popular, although neither he nor the big boss sampled it, both being confirmed non-drinkers. He had a bad moment when the time came to introduce Lynn Charles to Euclid J. Barrington-Phaff, but the beautiful redhead looked as fresh and sweet and as innocent as a sophomore, accepting the hotel baron's compliments on the job she had turned out with becoming grace and modesty. Elmer could hardly believe that she was the same girl he had seen, less than two hours earlier, astride a naked Hawaiian while a naked Japanese lashed her fabulous fanny with a white whip.
Yes, Elmer should have been pleased, but he wasn't. Instead, he was running scared. After the things he had witnessed in the kitchen, and in Lynn's room, was there any limit to the catastrophic possibilities germane to this perilous predicament? Furthermore, although the big boss was apparently delighted with the program, his fat face beaming with joviality, Elmer sensed a strange and alarming mood that seemed to be slowly gripping the guests. True, the punchbowl was liberally spiked with several kinds of rum and brandy. But this was something more than mere drunkenness. From the assembled throng of revelers he got the distinct impression of a kind of lazy, dreamlike, to-hell-with-it-anyway permissiveness, as though the bars of their inhibitions had not only been lowered but had been cast entirely aside. He noticed, for instance, that all the guests at the feast sat cross legged on the ground in the style traditional at luaus, but, whereas the women had begun the feast with skirts decorously pulled down to hide their knees, most of them now had allowed the hems to hike up until many thighs were bare nearly to the crotch. He glanced nervously at his boss to see if the big man had noticed, but apparently he had not.
A low stage had been erected at one end of the courtyard and it was there that the entertainers had been performing. A change in the tempo of the music drew the attention of everyone back to the stage as though they knew by instinct that the next act was to be the grand climax, the great finale for which all the other acts had been mere preliminaries.
Elmer shuddered. Kalola! She wouldn't dare!
He allowed himself to breathe again when she came running onto the stage to a fanfare of music. He saw that she was clad in a full-length grass skirt, halter top and at least six flower leis. The dance she did was one of the innocuous routines worked out earlier. It was greeted with applause but with no mighty ovation. Kalola smiled – and held up a small hand for silence. Elmer saw that she was going to speak, and fear crept back to walk with cold fingers up his spine. What was the little savage up to? This was not part of the program. Oh, well, maybe no one would be able to understand her anyway. Then she did the thing that eternally baffles mainlanders… she abandoned the patois she most frequently used and spoke in clear, precise and perfectly enunciated English.
"Thank you," she said simply. "The dance you have just seen might properly be labeled a theatrical version of our native dances and bears about as much resemblance to the real thing as oatmeal mush does to poi. You've been a great audience and I think you are entitled to view the Hawaiian hula-hula in its original form, and in a way in which it has only rarely been done since the days of Kamekameha The Great." She signaled the orchestra and all of the instruments remained silent but for the dull, hypnotic beating of the drums and the sharper, rhythmic clatter of the hardwood sticks on gourds. She fumbled for a moment behind her, then her halter top came off to be tossed off the floor of the stage. Her brown, beautiful breasts bobbed free, thrusting themselves out through the garlands of flowers that decorated her bosom. Her feet began the shuffling dance and her hands to move in the melting, liquid grace that is the soul of the hula.
"McFarthingale, what is this?" Euclid J. Barrington-Phaff demanded, his face purpling and his small, piggy eyes glowing with rising indignation. "That dancer… that savage… she's… why, she's completely topless!"
Elmer's answer was drowned in a roar of approval from the audience. They stamped and whistled and shouted. One of the men yelled the old, burlesque call of encouragement. "Take it off!" The others immediately took it up, and it became a chant, the swelling thunder of which drowned out even the drums. "Take it off! Take it off! Take it off!"
Kalola paused in her dance, regarded them quizzically with tilted head, then she grinned and quickly unfastened the top of her grass skirt. The flower leis followed it to the floor, and she was gloriously and primitively naked before them, her bronzed body gleaming in the murky, fitful light of the tiki torches that illumined the courtyard. The roar of appreciation that went up from the guests was deafening.
"Elmer!" Barrington-Phaff screamed, "do something about this at once!"
"Yes, sir," Elmer screamed back and summoned the nearest waiter. "Get up there on that stage and do something about this at once!" he yelled in the man's ear, unconsciously repeating Barrington-Phaff's own words.
The waiter, a Hawaiian, misunderstood his meaning. He had been sampling the punch, too. He ran laughing onto the stage, stripped himself of his white uniform and underwear and joined Kalola in the dance she was doing, his frenzied movements causing his cock to rotate like a majorette's baton.
"Oh, my God, no!" Elmer groaned, then manfully plowed and elbowed his way through the crowd that had now gathered around the stage. He made it and leaped up on the wooden platform, attempting to seize the wildly gyrating waiter.
"Leave him alone!" someone shouted. A woman jumped up behind him and began beating him on the back of the head with her handbag.
Barrington-Phaff was no coward. Seeing his employee thus set upon, he hurled his bulk stageward, knocking people right and left with his huge belly and massive shoulders. He almost made it before one of the men in the crowd tripped him and another one hit him in the eye as he was going down. The hotel employees who were professional servants – not the prostitutes, beach boys and bums Lynn had influenced Elmer to hire – rallied to the defense of their manager and of the big boss from New York. The ensuing donnybrook now ranks in history as the only major engagement fought in the South Pacific since the end of World War II. Like gladiators of ancient Rome, the contestants battled it out in the arena of the courtyard, and it must be admitted that the ladies of the A.A. of S.P.M. acquitted themselves as well as their men. Even so, the doughty warriors representing the toilet paper manufacturing industry might have gone down to defeat had not Ellen and Lynn arrived with reinforcements. When Ellen's chippies joined the fray on the side of the guests, the outcome was decided. The regular hotel men were routed and the victors sank wearily to the ground to rest.
"For Christ's sake, look at that, would you?" one of the men exclaimed weakly. He pointed to the stage where Kalola was flat on her back and the waiter who had been dancing with her was atop her, his cock plunging in and out of her in time to the beat of one drum that still resounded.
"Let's all fuck!" one of the women yelled, the dope, the excitement of the fight, and the sight of Kalola's public display of raw sex, driving her to a pitch of reckless passion that would not be denied. Eager cries of agreement were the response to her suggestion, and the nearest man to her leaped astride her. She helped him rip her dress off and unzip his trousers. His wife, who had long coveted the body of his district sales manager, pulled her skirt up to her waist and advanced upon that worthy with lewd intent. She found him quite willing. In a matter of minutes they were all at it. The remarkable thing about this mass screwing was that, despite the confusion, not one husband committed the social error of fucking his own wife.
Elmer McFarthingale opened one eye. The other was swollen shut. The back of his head ached, and he would have raised a hand to explore the egg-sized lump there, had not several hundred pounds of bone, fat and muscle been lying on his arm. His left leg was similarly imprisoned by the heap of inert bodies of which his was apparently a member of the lowest layer. He looked about him as well as he could and beheld a scene of utter devastation as well as complete debauchery. Rolling and writhing among the remains of the feast were the guests, all busily and happily fornicating. Not far away, Lynn Charles crouched nakedly above a groaning man. She had his cock in her mouth and was sucking it avidly. On the stage, Kalola was still being fucked… not by the waiter who had danced with her. Near Lynn, Ellen Canfield was on her hands and knees. One of the guests had his prick in her ass. Every time he thrust into her she farted and he laughed, seeming to find this musical type of intercourse hilariously funny.
Elmer lowered his gaze and found himself staring at one small, cold, unblinking eye that regarded him steadily with chillingly baleful malevolence.
"McFarthingale," Euclid J. Barrington-Phaff said distinctly, "you are fired."
"Yes, sir," Elmer answered… and then he fainted.
The three girls disembarked from the inter-island plane at the International Airport in Honolulu.
"It seems to me," Lynn said, "that this is where we came in… only we had a little money then and now we're flat broke. The plane fare cleaned us out. Suggestions anyone?"
"I guess I can always hitchhike out to the North Shore and try living with the hippies," Ellen said, "but after all the fun and excitement we've had, I don't think I could stand the quiet life."
"We're not going to break up… not after what we've been through together," Kalola declared. "There are always some sailors around the airport. Give me an hour and I'll have taxi fare for us. We can go see if Joe Moto will let us have our old shack back."
"Oh, to hell with it," Lynn vetoed this idea. "Let's just start walking. Maybe you're right. Maybe good old Joe will give us a break. Come on."
They walked half the distance before a Filipino truck driver picked them up. They came at last to the Pacific Paradise Hotel and climbed down from the load of cement sacks on which they had been riding.
"It's good to be home," Kalola said. "Let's go see Joe."
They knocked several times before the door opened. There before them, clad only in swim trunks, was Wikiwiki.
"Wiki!" they screamed in chorus and charged him. He went down under the flying attack, offering only ineffectual resistance to the kisses that showered onto his face and the hands that clutched avidly at his crotch.
"Hey, quit it!" he managed to say at last as he sat up and brushed them away like annoying flies. "For chrissakes let me breathe!"
"What are you doing here?" they all asked in unison. "Why did you desert us on Maui?"
"One question at a time," he countered, parrying another pass at his genitals. "In the first place, I and my partner are the new owners of the Pacific Paradise Hotel, and to answer a question you haven't yet asked, your old Number Four is empty and waiting for you. In the second place, I didn't exactly desert." They were amazed to see him blush under his dark skin. "I sort of got married."
"You what?"
"You heard him," another voice said as the former Miss Barrington-Phaff entered from a bedroom door. "What he said was that he got married… and I'll thank you to unhand his cock."
Speechlessly, the three girl stared at the gorgeous bride who wore nothing but a shorty nightgown and sandals.
"Yeh, we got married," Wikiwiki admitted. "Her papa disowned her, but she had enough bread of her own to buy this joint from Joe Moto. I've gone out of the beach boy business and into the hotel racket. As a matter of fact, we plan to turn the Pacific Paradise into the best damned whorehouse in the islands. We were just waiting for you three to show up to help us get started. I knew you'd come here. Without my brains, you were sure to screw things up for yourselves at the Hale-Kaahumanu. You kids want in on this deal?"
"You bet we do," Ellen answered for the others, "only no more fancy schemes. I've said all along that fucking is the only safe, sane and respectable way for decent girls to make a living."
"Don't worry about it," Evangeline assured her. "Wiki's scheming days are over. You'll find some old friends of yours here. Koko is to be the assistant manager. His wife took the kids and went back to Japan."
"Oh, goody!" Lynn cried, clapping her hands together. "I hope he brought his little white whip."
"And we were lucky to get Old Moke to come over as gardener," Evangeline went on. "Oh, yes, and there is one other. We have to have a pimp. No decent brothel can operate without a pimp. This one has become a drunk, and he's a nasty, dirty, lecherous old man, but he'll be good at the job because he'll do anything for a buck. Here he is now."
The three girls looked up to see a shabby, bearded figure in the doorway. He had his hat in his hand and was standing there, blearily eyeing Ellen with lustful greed.
It was Matthew Longworth.
"Well, we might as well get started," Kalola said, standing up. "I saw a bunch of sailors down on the avenue as we came by."
"Before we get down to business," Lynn interrupted, "don't you think this calls for a little celebration… a sort of combination homecoming and housewarming?"
"Like what?" Evangeline asked suspiciously.
"Oh," Lynn replied innocently, "I thought we might have a sort of party out on the lawn… like a luau maybe?"