Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  Picture the mother, the wife, now the last bones of the family. Hard and old and cold, holding everything up. Let’s not call it hope. It is a labor of sorts; that is all. Picture her as she realizes she can no longer go to work, because of the father, the constant observation he needs, and her employment goes almost as quickly as his. No money from him, no money from her. This means, in the city, they are dead.

  There’s only one place left to go, back to the Big Island, the land of your birth, where family still resides, your father’s brother and his successful business, extra buildings on his extra property that can house the diminished count of us.

  If she doesn’t beg, exactly, there’s still a quiet resignation to the mother. There’s still a kneeling, and opening of the palms upward, asking for something to be placed in them. Hands that used to push and take and grip their own way through the world.

  Picture what we’ve become without you, my son.

  Can you see it?

  29

  KAUI, 2009

  Portland

  Because the arrest. Because the second cold police car, my brother in the back. Because I couldn’t enter the station, had to hide and peek every now and then at the white walls and the steady shot of the clerk’s stamp on paper, case closure after closure. Because the last talk with Dean, in person after his arraignment, when he’d kept his mouth shut about me—before I had to head back south—we sat in those plastic spine-stabbing chairs at the table, what could we say? Because our eyes filled with a wet history, and we knew there wouldn’t be another visitor until his release, if then. Because another punch of poverty, no way to make bail, seeing what we can’t do as a family, again and again and again. Because I had to watch while the guards corralled him back to his cell, through the thick blue-white doors, heavy with locks and screens. Because I walked the rain-gleamed Portland downtown. Because that night, the cold gnawing through all of me, because the only dry doorway was by a parking garage, because the backpack that held the last physical pieces of Nainoa’s life became my pillow, because the plunging in and out of sleep. Because the stabs of ache all along my side: hip, ribs, shoulder. Because again the dumpster diving, this time for food, no college throwaway painkillers, right? Because the shelter after, the steaming rows of bunk beds in the homeless shelter, the mutterings in the unlit corners, the hunting knife I stole from the locker, its duct-taped handle, gripping it under my pillow. Because the morning lines: dingy porcelain bathroom, watered oatmeal, small television picture jumping, cartoons. Because the mouse blackened the cat with dynamite, pounded the cat as a peg with the sledgehammer, buckshotted out the cat’s teeth, each one tinkling as a piano key. Because the phone call, after my mother telling me she had failed Dean, had failed all of us if this is what we were, because she said I had to go back to school—“You’re the only one now,” she said, “you’re all we have left.” “But I can’t go back,” I said. “Mom, I just want to come home. Can you get me home? I just want to come home.” Because she found the money somewhere, somehow, her own form of magic, I came back to Hawai‘i.

  From the air the gas-burner-blue ocean pounds wave after wave into the crusted black slabs of lava on the Kona coast, little scoops of white-sugar sand beaches and coconut trees. The sun golden and everywhere and hot, even from inside the plane. We lower and we lower toward the ground. In the ocean below there’s an explosion of water and a humpback whale heaves itself free of the sea, vertical, twisting in the spray, two blue-gray dorsal fins and the smiling snout. Barnacles and knots of scabby skin. It twists and stretches as if it could keep going, right through the sky, never stop. But instead the water spins off it and dissipates into mist and the whale’s breach ends when it hits the water and throws up a giant sheet of foam.

  A prickly feeling all along my arms and legs and I get chicken skin: This is it. This is Hawai‘i.

  They meet me curbside at the airport, Mom and Dad rolling up in a pickup truck I don’t recognize, a white and lifted Tacoma with a rack in the bed and knobby tires. I’m sitting on a lava rock wall under a shady tree, close to one of the lei shops. Smell of plumeria and orchid. Pinks and purples and yellows. Mom hops out of the truck and comes around to the curb, looking me up and down. Like she needs to check and see if I’m damaged goods, right? I don’t ask her what her conclusion is. Finally she hugs me, holds on, longer than I expected. And I hug her back, longer than I expected. When I pull away Dad’s still sitting in the truck.

  Mom lifts my backpack from the concrete. “Not much in here,” Mom says.

  “What’s up with Dad?” I ask.

  “He’s—” Mom stops. We both stare at him. He’s not really looking toward us. Off instead to the voggy sky. “You see him,” Mom says. “I don’t know.”

  When I approach the window to get into the back seat of the truck’s cab Dad sees me. There’s a flicker of recognition, but it fogs over. He doesn’t smile or say hi or get up out of the truck. His lips are going, soft and smooth with some never-ending whisper.

  “Fuck, Mom,” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Her lips go flat, pressed hard on each other. “You think you could’ve done anything?”

  “Maybe,” I say. “What have you done? Anything?”

  She drops my backpack on the ground where she’s standing, ten feet back from the truck. “There’s space for you in the back seat,” she says, and goes around to her side.

  The truck swings away from the airport, up the road toward Hualālai, distant volcano gone green and brown all the way to the cloud-scudded peak. Then we turn northwest and the road tracks the coast, the broad table of old black lava flows surrounding us. The ocean curling into the shore. Up the hills are the bristling thorns of kiawe trees, and after we drive far enough, the hills become the desert grass of Waikoloa, right? All the while Dad just going, lips whispering or quiet and eyes blinking out toward the island. The skin near those eyes striated with a tired sort of anxiety.

  “Is he always like this now?” I ask.

  “He still breaks through here and there.”

  “Have you taken him to a doctor?”

  “Good idea,” Mom says. “I’ve raised three kids and been an adult for most of my life, but I didn’t think of that. A doctor.” She says, “Let me write that down.”

  “I just wanted—”

  “They couldn’t do anything for him, Kaui,” she says. “Just tests. That was their idea. This or that drug for a few months, have him come back to get tested all the time. After I got the bill for the first visit I never went back.”

  We pass through Waimea and it’s twenty degrees colder, fog and sideways rain from the wind, right? Like, people holding their hats and leaning their chests into the ripping gusts when they get out of their cars.

  “Who takes care of him while you work?”

  “I work nights,” she says. “When I go, Kimo checks on him every now and then.”

  “You leave him alone?”

  She shoots stink-eye at me. Then goes back to watching the road. Okay, the windshield wipers flap and squeak. “He’s usually asleep for all of it,” she says. “It’s the only way. Otherwise we don’t make any money.”

  When she says that I think about me at the shelter. After Dean was taken, right? Me calling from the shabby lobby, handwritten signs and a sour sweaty mildew smell underneath the tang of bleach. I just want to come home. And there was no hesitation from her when it came time to pay for the ticket. Now it was clear there must have been a million calculations in the back of her head. An endless accounting of what it would take.

  We come down from the peak of Waimea, eucalyptus and skyscraper trees, where I roll the window down just to breathe the Hāmākua air. The hissing of the cane fields. When we reach Uncle Kimo’s place there’s this huge grassy fenced-in field, the fresh-painted wooden eaves and clean picture windows facing out, down his property, toward the hills that end in cliffs of the northeast coast.

  At the far edge of the property there’s a small
er house, a little lanai facing that same ocean. None of the elegant finishes you’d find on the big house. But, like, it’s not slowly decaying the way our Kalihi place was. Mom takes the road leading to the back door of the little place.

  I catch her watching me. Waiting for my reaction. “What?” I say.

  “I had to sell our computer to get back here,” she says. Throws the truck into park. “Before you say anything.”

  “I wasn’t,” I say.

  “You get him inside, and take your bag. I’ll go drop the truck back off at Kimo’s.”

  When I walk into the small house with Dad I almost start. It’s mostly the bareness of it. There’s nothing on the walls. The cabinets are unpainted, the walls not more than primer. A faded rattan papasan chair in the corner, a mismatched pair of wicker love seats. A wobbling dining table that’s some sort of composite-fake-wood thing. Jesus, is what I want to say. Has it always been like this?

  There’s the distinct tapping splatter of liquid hitting the floor. Okay, I turn and see Dad with a hot sheet of piss down his pants.

  “Don’t—” I say. But he can’t not. Which means he does. When Mom comes in I’ve just started to get his rubber slippers off.

  “Towel,” I say.

  “No,” she says. “Get his clothes off.”

  “Me?” I say.

  “He’s already splashed you. It’s on your jeans and feet.”

  She’s right. But still.

  “We spent years wiping your ass,” she says. “This is nothing.”

  “No way,” I say.

  She takes two strong steps toward me. The movement reminds me of what she used to be: all-state basketball and the thighs and back to go with it, right? But it’s not that there’s a threat. She just wants to be close enough that I can feel her words.

  “Kaui,” she says, “this is how life is here. Which means it’s yours now, too, for as long as you’re here. Help me the fuck out.”

  I start with his shirt. I find he’s able to help, it’s a pattern his body knows. He pulls his own arms through the sleeves. After the shirt I see his back and chest. His arms. Sprayed with small mosquito bites and old scars, purpled smooth scratches on the brown tree trunk of his body. After his pants I see places where his hair has been worn thin. At the bulge of his calves. At the peak of his thighs, from the rubbing of jeans and shorts.

  “I can finish,” Mom says. “I’ll take him to the shower. You don’t have to learn it all in one day.”

  I’m grateful and don’t argue. I watch her walk him to the bathroom. He can move himself mostly, but that’s about it. Like, he pilots his body and leaves us to the rest of it. I think of what he used to be, a man that could lift a piano with one or two other guys. Ironman football all those years ago. Then the felling of canes, the carving out of clean flat spaces in our old yard with a machete. Shirts stretched tight against the bulk of his chest after he’d hefted rocks and thrashed weeds. After he’d wrenched another year out of our rusting cars. I see all that and I’m not sure if I can do this, being here.

  That night we eat a simple dinner, Spam-and-rice furikake. There’s a bit of fresh papaya we scoop after. We talk—like, I know my mom’s mouth is moving and I’m moving my mouth—but I’m not there. I’m three thousand miles away. Earlier, I’d sent a text message to Van, hey.

  The reply was a long time coming. People from the university came by, said they have to start sending your stuff home.

  Yeah, I typed. Gonna be here awhile.

  Hard at home? she asked.

  Hard everywhere, I said.

  Minutes went by. The screen flashing with a picture that showed she was typing something back. Then it stopped. Then it started again, she was typing. But it stopped.

  How much do you remember from that party? I asked.

  More typing and stopping from her. Typing and stopping.

  You left me, she wrote back.

  I came back, I said.

  Only after Katarina and Hao, she typed. Fucking Connor was trying to get on me. I barely remember all of that but I remember who was there when I needed it.

  I squeezed the phone so hard I could feel it in my shoulders. I was drunk, too, I almost typed but then didn’t. I typed, I’m sorry, but deleted it all. I typed, Do you remember how you called me gross and did you mean it, but I deleted it all.

  I turned my phone off after that.

  At night mom goes to work. Cleaning offices in Waimea and Waikoloa. I sleep on one of the love seats in the living room, or else on the floor with a few towels underneath me to soften the wood, and tonight I’m just starting to fade when there’s a thud, doors closing, the swoosh and clatter of the screen door. I sit up, turn on the lights, and see Dad heading out into the yard. Okay, so I squirm into clothes and make for the lanai, to follow him. But he doesn’t go far. He’s there, cross-legged. Just outside the rectangles of light the house windows throw on the grass in the darkness. Him sitting there like a monk in the dark, right? I don’t speak; he’s not going anywhere, not hurting anyone. I watch as he bends forward and presses his ear to the ground. He stays that way so long I finally come off the lanai into the grass with him, talking, saying, “Dad, you need to get up, what are you doing? It’s cold out here.” But he stays down, even as I speak. Me saying, “Dad, let’s go back inside, I’ll get you a glass of water.” But he won’t rise easy. He stays bent in supplication. Just listening. Eyes squinted, lips just a little open. Finally I stop tugging, I stop talking. I lean into the grass myself, ear to the ground, facing him.

  I don’t hear anything.

  And Dad’s whispering, “Listening, listening, listening.”

  “Okay, Dad,” I say. “Okay.” I reach for his shoulder.

  He gives me a stink-eye, bats my arm away. Sits back up completely straight.

  “Listen,” he says. “Listen, listen, listen. It’s not just a dance.”

  It’s the first time he’s talked in a regular voice since I’ve been home. I have nothing ready.

  “It’s not just a dance,” he says again.

  The hula. Ice stipples my arms and legs. “What’s not just a dance?”

  “What they look like when they come to you?” he asks. “You have to listen. Like me.”

  “Listen to what, Dad?” I ask.

  But something’s changed, okay? His face goes slack like he’s seven beers deep, but of course he hasn’t been drinking anything.

  “Dad,” I say, “stay with me.”

  But he doesn’t.

  30

  DEAN, 2009

  County Correctional Facility, Oregon

  In here after the sentencing and you’d think it’s all ass-rape and gang shanks, but for real it’s the quiet that’s violent. Most minutes in jail is like this:

  And in between get the light-blue-and-white walls and that’s it. County Corrections, light blue and white, light blue and white. The two colors that’s everything in here. Underneath the light blue and white I can see the writing we all put on the walls while we’re dying, while we’re hurting ourselves in here, because that’s what you really do in jail, hurt yourself, and even when they paint over ’um, the words sawed in with the shaved side of a spoon we palm out the dining area, we just do it again, all the crazy coming out of someone’s skull while they sit and shrink against the thin mattress, and some of it’s garbage like Yabba dabba doo and some of it’s for real like God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time.

  You cannot keep ’um down, the good or the bad, either way they come up still through all the layers of paint people put on.

  The room is five steps from the door to bunks and it’s four from wall to wall and in between get the cold steel no-lid toilet and the cold steel barrel of a sink and all in the air get the cold steel stab of my memories. Get my bunk, it’s too short but it’s the top, a plank built straight into the wall and turned sideways so my feet touch one wall and my head touches the other, and above and to my side there’s just this thin block of
a window.

  First day in, they had us all in stalls and bending over, the officers like, I wanna see the top of your mouth from behind, boy, and we turned and bent and bent and spread our ass cheeks cold. They was looking for drugs and checked us for everything else, toes and feet and fingers and teeth. When it was done we got in our scrubs, light blue with the pink sleeves, thin and fuzzy, and our haole-style bad sandals like we’re in a old-folks’ home. After getting in my new uniform I came into my room and it was empty and I was thinking it would be an easy one eighty days until they brought Matty right behind me. I’d been in the room maybe two minutes and there he was, carrying his sheet to wrap the mattress, curly blond-boy hair all blown out like he just woke up. He had cankles all chipped with scars and way-freckled arms with stretch marks and a rounded back like maybe he’d been strong at something once but he’d sort of forgot about it. Here he comes escorted to the room. I was all keyed up and ready for throw and thinking about all the movies I seen. Specially the prison scenes.

  The fuck you looking at, I said.

  Matty stopped. Right at that door. The guards in their tree-green uniforms stacked behind him, saying, Keep moving, keep moving, and saying to me, Stand down if you don’t want to go into iso. And Matty stopped and grinned at me. But it wasn’t evil. It was fully chill and wrinkled and he said, Boy, don’t give me none of that gangsta rap shit. Like you’re Fifty Cent up in this motherfucker.

  And he was right. And I laughed.

  Me and Matty don’t talk much. When we’re in the room we’re both up in our bunks and reading, or doing push-ups on the floor, where the cold on the concrete comes up your hands into your arm muscles, or else we’re taking turns shitting on the toilet while we try not for look at each other.

  Watch out, Matty said one time, way in the deep black of lights-out, while he rustled to his feet and headed for the toilet, tonight was taco night.