Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  “We can’t do this,” your father said to me. It was late in the evening, after you all were asleep. Dogs were barking down the road, but the sound was soft and we were used to it. The gold light from our desk lamp made our skin look honey-coated. Your father’s eyes were wet. He wouldn’t look straight at me, and I realized I hadn’t heard a joke from him in so long. That was when I was really afraid.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Maybe two months until trouble,” he said.

  “And then what?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

  “I gonna call Royce,” he said. “We been talking.”

  “Royce lives on O‘ahu,” I said. “That’s five plane tickets. That’s a whole different island, a city. Cities aren’t cheap.” But your father was already standing up and walking toward the bathroom. The light went on, and the fan, then the water hissing and spattering in the sink, the wet sucking and spraying of his breaths as he washed his face.

  I wanted to break something, it was so still and quiet. Your father came back in the bedroom.

  “So I think,” he said, “I’m gonna sell my body. The mahus get my okole and the ladies get my boto. I’d do that for us.”

  “I’d do that for you,” he followed, after pausing a moment. He had his shirt off and was looking at himself in our long mirror. “I mean, check ’um, yeah? All the sex waiting in this body.”

  I giggled and hugged him from behind. I spread my hands over each pectoral and ignored the way they were starting to sag a little toward bitch tits. “I’d probably pay money for these,” I said.

  “How much?” Your father grinned in the mirror.

  “Well,” I said, “what’s included?” I let my left hand drift down, worked it into his waistband.

  “Depends,” he said.

  “Mmmm,” I said. “What I’m feeling’s probably worth two or three dollars.”

  “Hey!” He pulled my hand out.

  “I’d be paying by the minute,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, and your father snorted. But then he paused.

  “We’re going to have to sell more than my dick,” he said.

  We both sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “We’ve got Kaui and Nainoa wearing Dean’s old clothes,” I said. “They get free school lunch.”

  “I know.”

  “What did we have for dinner last night?” I asked.

  “Saimin and Spam.”

  “What did we have for dinner the night before?”

  “Rice and Spam.”

  Your father stood back up. He walked to our desk and leaned down on it, placed his palms on it like he was going to push it this way or that.

  “Fifteen dollars,” he said.

  He stood, sighed, laid his palm on the dresser. “Twenty-five dollars.”

  “Forty,” I said.

  “Twenty.” He shook his head.

  He went this way, touching each thing he could see: a seven-dollar lamp, a two-dollar picture frame, a closet full of five-dollar clothes, the sum of our lives not more than four digits.

  And I was never good at math but I could see the other end of this and there were dark lights and payment plans and bucket showers on the other side. So three days after those calculations we got you kids to school and I was at the roadside, hitchhiking with your father’s hunting knife in my bag, getting forty miles to Hilo on no cost just to walk in the sweaty rain to the Section Eight division of County of Hawai‘i and start our application. “What brings you here today?” the woman at the counter asked, not unfriendly, and with her dark and freckled arms, the extra folds of skin outside her sleeveless blouse, she could have been my sister, was my sister.

  “What brings me here,” I repeated. If I had the answer I wouldn’t have been standing there, steaming Hilo wet, begging for the housing vouchers.

  And that was how we were when the third sign came. We couldn’t cut any more corners. But Royce had come through, as simple as a phone call to your father and a phrase, “I think I got something for you, cuz,” and suddenly everything pointed to O‘ahu. We’d sold some of our stuff and then we sold more, roadsiding it in Waimea, by the playground, across the street from the Catholic church, where all the trees grow up over the parking strips and everyone has to drive past if they’re headed to the beach. We’d made enough from those sales, the food bank’s help, and Section Eight to get a cushion, enough for five tickets to O‘ahu with something still in the bank.

  Your father had a plan for the rest of the money—a glass-bottom boat cruise on the Kona coast. I remember telling him no, we couldn’t do that, we needed to save every last penny for O‘ahu. But he’d asked what kind of father would he be if he couldn’t give his children relief?

  “They deserve more than they get,” he said, I still remember this, “and we gotta remind them that things is gonna get better.”

  “But we don’t need some tourist cruise,” I said. “We’re not that kind of family.”

  “Well,” he said, “maybe just once I wanna be that kind of family.”

  I had nothing to say to that.

  So Kailua-Kona, Ali‘i Drive, small stone walls and swerving sidewalks fronting the scoops of sugary beach and luminous ocean, then all the little storefront tourist traps, leading back like breadcrumbs to the beach hotels. Your father and I stood at the Kona dock, each holding a ticket for the boat ride, plus one for each of you kids, and we watched the tides surge and all the clean glossy boats rock and dip and shine slick with each swell. The pier was long and blacktopped and spined with fishing poles, and halfway along the dock’s edge a group of local boys were pitching themselves off, into the water, over and over, exploding into the ocean-froth of the boy who’d jumped before, chee-hoo’ing and slapping their wet feet across the wood steps back to the edge.

  Then we were out away from the dock of Kona, sitting in a plush jointed couch on the Hawaiian Adventure, a trimaran like the types we always see drifting in the haze of the Kona coast, especially at sunset, boats with slides off the back and lobster-colored tourists jabbering on the covered decks. But this one had a middle hull with thick glass in the bottom that let us look down into the ocean, and as the engines pushed a mellow vibration again and again across the deck, the water went from something green-blue to a deep, almost purple color, and the coral grew up thick and knotted, in sections stuck out fingers or bloomed brains and the spiked red fans of sea anemones, swaying like the tide was a wind. I could smell the sun, the way it heated the old sea salt on the edges of the boat, and the sharp too-sweet fruity Malolo syrup in the fruit punch, and the sting of diesel fuels belching from the grinding engines.

  Mostly we sat inside, all five of us in a row right down front in the plush stadium seating, looking through the glass bottom, me telling stories about which animal was which god, how they saved or fought the first Hawaiians, your father cracking jokes about how his Filipino forefathers only eat dogfish or the black fish with long noses, and the sun slanted in under the ceiling and the motor kept churning its hum up through our seats. I was somewhere warm and slow and Kaui was asleep in my arms when I woke without knowing why.

  You and Dean and your father were gone, in fact no one was in the viewing cabin. Voices were rising out on the deck. I shifted Kaui from my lap—she complained—and I stood. The voices were clipped into basic commands: We’re going to make a turn, keep pointing, get the preserver. I remember feeling like the sounds were coming from the other side of a cavern, so far away and cotton-stuffed in my head.

  I grabbed Kaui’s hand. She was still rubbing her eyes and complaining, but I was already bringing her with me as I climbed the stairs from the viewing cabin to the sundeck. Impossibly white. I had to shade my eyes and squint so hard I felt my lips and gums lift. People were gathered along the cabled rail of the slick white deck, looking into the ocean. Pointing.

  I remember seeing your father and Dean. They were maybe thirty feet away from me and Kaui, and I was confused because your father was wrestling Dean back
from the rail and Dean was screaming Let go, and I can get him. One of the deckhands in a white polo shirt and baseball hat pitched a red life preserver into the air, and it wobbled and wheeled out into the sky with the rope whipping behind.

  Did I run then to your father? Had he pulled Dean off the rail? Was I gripping Kaui’s hand so hard it hurt her? I can assume, but I can’t remember. I only remember that I was at your father’s side then on the blazing-white deck, rising and falling with the waves, and all our family was there, except for you.

  Your head was bobbing like a coconut in the ocean. You were getting smaller and farther away and the water was hissing and spanking the boat. I don’t remember anyone saying much of anything, except the captain, calling out from upstairs: “Just keep pointing. We’re turning. Just keep pointing.”

  Your head went under and the ocean was flat and clean again.

  There was a song playing from the speakers. A tinny, stupid-sweet Hawaiian cover of “More Than Words,” which I still can’t listen to, even though I liked it once. The engines churned. The captain was talking from the wheel upstairs, asking Terry to keep pointing. Terry was the one who’d thrown the life preserver that was floating empty in the waves, moving away from where I’d seen your head.

  I was tired of being told to point, being told to wait, so I said something to Terry. He made a face. Then his mouth was moving under his mustache, words back at me. And the captain was calling again from above. Your father started in, too, all four of us saying things. I think I finished talking with something that made Terry start, so that his face flushed around his sunglasses. I saw myself in those mirrored lenses, me darker than I thought I was, which I remember made me happy, and my shoulders from basketball, and that I’d stopped squinting my eyes. Then my feet were up on the railing and Terry’s eyebrows were raised and he started to open his mouth at me. He reached for me—I think your father did, too—but I leapt into the big empty ocean.

  I hadn’t been swimming long when the sharks passed under me. I remember them first as dark blurs, that the water told me the weight of those animals, a shove of wake against my legs and belly. They passed me and all four of their fins punched the surface, knives on the summit of dark swells, cutting for you. When they reached where your head had been, the sharks dove under. I started to swim after them but the distance might as well have been to Japan. I dunked once to try and see. Underwater there was nothing but a vague darkness and froth where the sharks were. Other dark colors. Pink and chummy ropes rising from the froth—I knew those would be next.

  I didn’t have any more breath. I broke the surface and choked in oxygen. If there were sounds, if I yelled, if the boat was closer, I don’t remember. I went back down. The water where you were was all churn. The shapes of the sharks were thrashing, diving, rising, something like a dance.

  The next time I went for air you were at the surface, sideways, prone and ragdolling in the mouth of a shark. But the shark was holding you gently, do you understand? It was holding you like you were made of glass, like you were its child. They brought you straight at me, the shark that was holding you carrying its head up, out of the water, like a dog. The faces of those things—I won’t lie. I shut my eyes as they neared, when I was sure they were coming for me, too, and if everyone was yelling and crying out, as I imagine they were, and if I was thinking anything, I don’t remember any of that except the black of my closed eyes and my prayers without a mouth.

  The sharks never hit. They passed again below, around me, wake like a strong wind. And then I opened my eyes. You were there at the boat, clutched to a life preserver. Your father reaching down for you—I remember how angry I was at how slow he went, all the time in the world, and I wanted to say, Are you a fucking pau hana county worker? Grab our child, our alive child—and you were coughing, which meant you were breathing, and there was no red cloud in the water.

  This wasn’t just one of those things.

  Oh my son. Now we know that none of it was. And this was when I started to believe.

  2

  NAINOA, 2000

  Kalihi

  Hear the blood hush, then rush, the thud of it coming along my knuckles. Cracked knuckles, swollen knuckles, bloody knuckles. Bloody knuckles used to hit and hurt, not because I wanted to but because my brother made me. This was New Year’s, Black Cat Crackers up and down the cul-de-sac, pop pop pop, whole families in green plastic chairs in their driveways, sidewalks smooched with char and red shreds of paper. The fireworks were going and Skyler and James went behind the garage to play Bloody Knuckles with Dean, and since Dean went, I went, and since I went, Kaui went.

  Years already I’d been trying to understand what was inside me, while the rest of the world was trying to tear it out. Especially my brother sometimes. This was one of those nights where he hated me.

  Skyler, James, both of them hapa Japanese, tall and round stinking teenagers. James with his braces, glittering and spitty. Skyler with his floppy hair and cheekfields of pimples. Both with their prep-style clothes, all Polo and Abercrombie. And there was my brother with his jaw-length twizzles of hair, baggy Billabongs and too-small Locals Only T-shirt, surfer-dark skin and pursed thick lips. So obvious we didn’t belong, but Dean was always trying to trade up: him and Skyler and James, their knuckles already blistered with blood, laughing and shaking the pain out of their hands.

  “Miracle boy’s turn,” James said through his braces, nodding at me.

  “Fully,” Skyler agreed, “I think so, yeah, Dean?”

  All night my brother had been one-upping them both, James and Skyler. My brother running faster, swearing dirtier, the only one quick enough to cockroach a beer from the adults’ cooler. So cool, all for James and Skyler, since their families had glossy SUVs and heavy dark furniture in their high-ceiling houses, everything Dean wanted to be. But how could he get there, I bet he wondered, besides getting rich boys close enough that maybe he could absorb some of whatever they were that we weren’t.

  And me and my brother both knew I was the only one that had done anything for us anyway, because of the sharks, what came after. We’d been on the news and in the papers and every time Mom and Dad had been talking about how poor we were. So then we were getting donation checks and clothing drives and even free food some places, from everyone that had seen and heard the stories Mom and Dad kept telling, how I was lucky to survive the attack but we were so broke that groceries and rent and bills were going to kill us instead.

  And even after the letters and donations, things didn’t stop. I talked about the sharks in my Kahena Academy application, the selection committee had probably heard of me, too. So I got into the best prep school in the state—a full scholarship, the same as it was for all Native Hawaiians—even if the school was full of kids far beyond what James and Skyler were.

  And my family, especially Dean, could see all the other things happening to me, that I was getting smarter, quickly, that it might as well be magic how my brain was vaulting me past my classmates. And the ‘ukulele, too—the songs I could play—He’s some kind of prodigy, the teachers were saying, and Mom and Dad like the sun when teachers talked about me. They’d started to say I was something special. Even right where Dean and Kaui could hear.

  All that happening and my brother here with James and Skyler, then me. They all knew what they’d heard.

  “So what, Dean,” Skyler said, “I get a turn with him or what?”

  Dean stared at me, started to smile, but I swear underneath I saw a flinch, maybe he didn’t want it to go all the way, he was still after all my brother. But then the grin spread. “Everyone gotta take a turn, Noa,” he said.

  Illegal aerials—the type of red and blue and gold explosions only hotels were supposed to launch—boomed in the black above us, tossing our shadows against the stucco walls of Skyler’s mansion.

  “You’ve got a hundred pounds on me, easy,” I said to Skyler. Like that would help, like anything would help.

  “No be like that,” Jam
es said. “Fairy.”

  “Get some bloody knuckles,” Skyler said, stepping closer, punching hand still twitching. He aimed it at me, made a fist, the clench was slow and stiff and I could see the flaps of skin on his knucklebones, the bits of blood. Around the corner came the murmur of the party, the sparkling crash of beer bottles piling up, then the firecrackers, pop pop pop.

  “Cut it out,” Kaui said, her voice smaller than all of us, she actually put her hands on her hips. We all froze, every boy, we’d forgotten about her, standing at my side, little sister three years under me.

  I looked at Dean again, I wish I hadn’t; it shames me now to remember it. How I was thinking he might still step in, say it was a joke, of course a teenager with the body of a man shouldn’t be pounding on a middle-schooler.

  “Come on, mahu,” Skyler said to me. “What, first time punching? Hold your hand up.”

  I raised my fist. Dean leaned back lazy on the wall, crossed his arms.

  Kaui said, “Noa, don’t.”

  “Go away,” I said to her. “It’s between us.”

  Skyler put his fist up. Six inches from mine. Our knuckles: his already chewed with punches, mine all smooth and thin, even I saw the ending. Then Skyler moved to punch me; I flinched. “No flinching,” he said, punched my shoulder with his other fist, soon there would be a bruise like the day after immunization. “We gotta go again,” he said.

  So we did, set our fists in the air facing each other. I tried to make my wrist lock, tried to think of what I could be that wouldn’t break or bend, statue or train or rock wall, but then he punched into my knuckles. There was a bony slapping sound.

  Pain shot to my elbow, I yelped, Skyler hooted. “Gotta go one more time if you cry like that, pussy.”

  I looked at Dean again, but he made like he was only watching the fireworks, burning in the air above.

  “He not gonna save you,” James said. “It’s big-boy time, sack up, bitch.”