Days go where I think about Mom and Dad and Kaui on the outside, everything they need, and Noa gone away now. Long time I told myself things was gonna be different. Maybe all that was a dumb fucking dream from the start. Maybe it wasn’t never supposed for be anything but like this.
And that thought hits me fully true. And I know what I gotta do. When we get our walk time, I head to the phone and make a call, one of Justice’s guys, I don’t know his real name. On the phone he says he’s Paul.
“Hey, my man!” Paul says. He sounds as haole as can be. “I hope you’re . . . getting by in there. Doing your time, right?”
“Yeah, speaking of,” I say. I gotta figure how for tell him my idea. “Feels like it’s gonna be longer than I thought, you know? Some days I think I might do something stupid, get in trouble, just for stay in here.”
He’s quiet. Thinking. “Well, slow down,” he says. “You do what you gotta do. I’m not there, so I don’t know what it takes. But think about everyone out here, you know?”
That’s him saying, We appreciate your services, but don’t stay in there too long. It’s good, I figure. Means they think I can do bigger things on the outside.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I say. “Just been thinking about my family, too, you know? I wanna have ’um proud of me, when I get out.”
Which is me saying, I need to get money to my family.
My money.
Our money.
“Yeah, I hear you,” Paul says.
Once the bank account gets big enough to mean something, it’s going straight to Hawai‘i. I know Justice-guys can help make that happen.
After the call, I start figuring how for get a little more time in here. There’s all sorts of rules to break, and you know that’s one thing I’m good for.
Yeah. I can do this.
34
KAUI, 2009
Honoka‘a
Now it’s just my hands. The earth. The sweet stink of chicken shit steaming in the soil. Tang of clipped grass, the heat of growth coming off the field. Five weeks now I’ve been doing this, right? Hitting Hoku’s farm early-early, staying home nights with my dad while Mom works cleaning shifts. Okay, I used to hate waking up so early. But I’ve started to enjoy these first hours the best. The air is fresh with unbreathed oxygen and my ears are stuffed with pure quiet. Pale-yellow glaze on the fringes of the sky. Light chill where I can feel the hairs on my neck, below my bunned-up hair.
It’s just Hoku and me working his little farm. We weed. We turn soil and introduce manure. Other natural fertilizers. We move rocks. Clear cane. I like the way the machete feels. The way a hacking strike makes the stalks clap before they fall. The hiss and clatter of moving a set of stalks, the way something more organized and ordinary appears underneath the cane when we clear it, when the ground is just the ground. Waiting to be turned. Hoku has a narrow, long yawn of land out here. At one end he built a corrugated tin shed and stretched a tarp over six poles for a garage and workbench. At the other end our grooming meets a fence and the stalks and bushes that lean over it. Okay, Hoku wants to try and get these fields ready for a crop as soon as he can—I don’t know if to start selling it or so he can start eating again, or what. I never see him with food. The only water he drinks is whatever beer is on sale at the grocery store. We don’t talk much. He just gives me directions, and I even surprise myself when I mostly follow them without a word. We till. We weed. We saw. We hammer. We sweat. We splinter. We work.
I’m tilling and I’m gone. Zoned in the tang of gasoline and clipped grass, the drone of the engine, and the buck and dive as the tiller spins down the soil. I’m something like asleep until I see her toes in front of me, about to go under the tiller blades.
I flinch and pull the tiller up short. There she is. A broom of black kinked hair. Sun-dark skin and blunted face of an original Hawaiian. Bare-chested and thick-titted and all broad belly, glittering with a day’s work of sweat. She stands facing me and doesn’t blink. Completely statue, okay? Not breathing.
Then she takes a step.
Hula dreams, I think. That’s you.
She takes another step. A weight pulls all my guts down: I have the distinct feeling she wants to harm me.
“Wait,” I say.
She takes another step.
“Wait,” I say again, and start to step backward. But I’m still holding the tiller’s handles, the engine still pockpockpocking and droning. The breeze absolutely dead. There’s a smell that was never there, the strong smell of keawe-wood smoke. Like out of nowhere there’s a forest on fire right behind us. But it’s only the woman and even in the time it took to understand the smell is her, she’s moved again. She steps through the tiller, stands between the handles. Which puts her right between my arms.
I jump back from the handles and start to say—But suddenly I feel like I’m thin and strong and old, like a bird made out of leather. I’ve walked a million miles. There is a child on my back, wrapped in tapa cloth and smoothed bark-rope. It’s easy—I’ve carried whole generations this way. I’m ascending alongside the cold mineral smell of a stream, up the muddy trails to the mist and scraggy peak of a mountain ridge. Could be the Ko‘olaus or the Waihe‘e Ridge or anywhere at all in Hawai‘i, right? I’m hefting kalo in bunches, hairy roots tickling my wrist. When I look around I see there is no sugarcane here, never has been. Plants that are dinosaur-height and mad with color. The muscles of their roots, tendrilled through the rich earth—but there’s something like a sudden impact on my lungs and eyes and then Hoku’s voice calling, Hey hey hey.
Blue. I’m looking at the sky. The cool grit of soil on my back. My mind dilates; I’m waking up. And, okay, here’s Hoku above me, blocking out the clouds, shirt slouching off his chest as he bends forward. He kneels to my side, glances up and down along my whole body. “What, drugs or something?” he asks. I can smell the sour mix of coffee and hot dogs on his breath.
“I just thought I’d lie down for a second,” I say. “You know, do some cloud gazing.” I roll over, kneel, stand. My vision pinwheels. “You normally work your slaves to death, or what?”
“You only been working for an hour,” he says. “Still morning.”
“I know what time it is,” I say. Which is a lie, right? I’m not sure exactly where I am.
“I not working you,” Hoku says. “You is working you.”
I stand on the flat ground and feel the tilt and swerve. The sun is white and everywhere. “I’m fine,” I say. “Let’s get back to it.” And I do, okay? But the tiller and the dirt and my skeleton don’t feel like they’re even in the same reality.
After what seems like a reasonable amount of time, I sit on a folding metal chair that’s stenciled with Property of Honoka‘a High School and drink a glass of tap water in the shade.
“Stop looking at me,” I say to Hoku. I take another swallow of water.
Hoku stops doing whatever he was doing and walks over to me. Leans against one of the workbenches. He crosses his arms and wants to know if I have cancer.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I say. “I’m fine.”
“You not working for me if you gonna die in my field,” he says. I ask him where else he’d get labor so cheap. He laughs. “In Honoka‘a? I sneeze and it hits someone without a job.”
I snort, but he’s right.
And he starts a nagging interrogation. Every illness he can think of: Cancer? Heart murmur? AIDS? Sickle cell? Gonorrhea? Asthma? Tumor? Chronic laziness? And even though I answer no to all of these things, it doesn’t matter. Something about his eyebrows. His jaw. Either I tell the truth or I’m never coming back here.
“I don’t need this,” I say.
“Then go,” he says.
We both just stand there. He places his hands on the workbench and leans forward on locked elbows.
“I’ll see a doctor,” I say, and shrug.
Hoku yanks on the brim of his wide-brim, woven hat, but it can’t go any lower on his head, right? Stands back from me.
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“Go home,” he says.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Why’s that?”
I can’t tell him what I’ve seen. They are there. Finding me when I close my eyes. Women who can only be Kānaka Maoli, skin joyfully dark and thick with work, proud cheeks and eyes full of the old island ways. The salty, fruit-tinged stink of their sweat takes over my nose. They dance on a hilltop. They dance in a valley. Kaholo, ‘ami kāhela, lele, ‘uwehe. They reap in bundles with hands plunging into dark-brown soil that gives and gives and gives. Something is alive all over my body now. Something like a hula that won’t stop dancing.
“There’s something here,” I say. “I can feel it. Something big.”
35
DEAN, 2009
Portland
When I step outside the prison it’s not at all like I was thinking. It’s a flat paper-colored sky that got enough light to make the wet flash off the sidewalks but then it’s dim enough it still feels like I’m inside. Might as well I’m in Spokane, it’s the same sort of feeling, where you can’t tell October from March and you just know some of the brown is leaking from your skin every day. I’m on the steps outside County Corrections and I’m back in Noa’s clothes, got his skinny-ass sweatpants ending at my shins and the waistband knifing into my hips and tearing with each step and the hoodie I have to keep open ’cause it ain’t zipping up ever. I feel like everywhere I’m about to rip.
I’m out. Nobody to escort me, or some sheriff or county worker or whatever to chaperone me from this place to the next. I got a thick plastic bag with all the stuff I was carrying when they brought me in: wallet, one penny, two quarters, receipt from a 7-Eleven, credit card, cell phone. I wonder who got to smoke the joints I had, bet it was one of those fucking cops and his wife or something. Now, out here, there’s tan pebbly steps in front of me and people in the street below with their briefcases and kids waiting for buses and construction workers at the end of the block with some buzzing machine scraping metal over the wet blacktop.
But my cell phone’s dead and Justice never sends his people down here for a pickup, it’s the one thing he was saying about getting out. I gotta make my own way to him. Almost feels like a test. And I fucking hate tests, I got no idea what for do next. I swing one hand into the pocket of the sweatpants. Got a paper scratching at me and when I pull ’um out, no shit, like an answer from God, the paper says Khadeja, and a number. Hell, no, is what I’m thinking.
But it’s cold and I stand there long enough and the no goes to yes. Bad idea. But I do ’um anyway.
Back inside I ask to use the phone and the lady on the other side of the bulletproof glass pops her gum and gives me a dead look.
“I bet you get that question all the time,” I say.
She’s all, “Every one of you people that comes out those doors. Plus people coming in off the street. There’s families, too . . .” She shakes her head.
“I like your braids,” I say. “You do ’um yourself?”
She laughs once, ha, smirks like, come on. “Like I’ve got three arms and eyes on the back of my head that can see where to do it all?”
“Oh,” I say. “But I mean, looks good, those red braids and your dark skin, don’t be like that.”
She pops her gum and gives me the dead stare again.
“You know you kinda look like Oprah, though,” I say. “You ever hear that? Got that same no-nonsense look, yeah. When you gonna quit this job and get something better?”
She does that one-sound laugh again, ha, rolls her eyes. She strokes her braids. “You don’t even know how fast I’m leaving this place.” She shoves the phone up close to the glass. “I tell you what, you get one call,” she says. “Two minutes.”
“Whatchyou doing later?” I say while I’m grabbing the phone, but I almost start laughing even when I say it, and she starts laughing, too, she’s all, “Like I’m finna take your prison-clothes-wearing ass to Cheesecake Factory or something.” She points to the phone and makes deuces with her fingers. “Two minutes.”
When Khadeja picks up I say, “It’s Dean, don’t hang up.”
“Who?”
“Nainoa’s brother.”
The line goes quiet.
“Don’t hang up, I said.”
After, I’m standing out on the steps, I figure Khadeja’s not coming even though she said she would, but then there she is, pulling up in her little sedan, wearing her black pantsuit and her hair out in the full Afro, not like the cornrows in front with the Afro puff in back I seen last time. I try for take a step toward her but something happens.
I have to keep pulling on Noa’s sweatpants, because they can’t stay up, but it’s more than that. Almost it’s like I don’t wanna go from the prison, like it’s scary. I stop and turn and there’s that prison and I’m fully sad, how crazy is that. Feels like I’m leaving home, or at least a place that made more sense than most other places I been, which means it is a home, I figure. Around me now there’s all this space and noise and light and everything that comes after Noa, just waiting around the corner.
But I blow out a breath and take a step, then another. At the bottom there’s Khadeja. She’s got a worried face.
“You’re walking slow, did they hurt you in there?”
I snort. “It’s prison. Whatchyou think?”
And she’s all playing with her key chain, watching it spin and dangle. She stops. “I’m only here because of Nainoa,” she says. “So don’t give me any of that attitude.”
The anger comes on me in one big flex. “Look at the good girlfriend,” I say, “here for him now, not like back when he was hurting real bad and needed someone and you was out the door. Lucky him.”
She looks me over. Down, up, down. Then she presses the accelerator and the car jumps forward, throws my hands off the frame, and she keeps going, driving down the street away from me. I cross my arms and wait, like, Yeah, right, she’s gonna drive away without me. But then she’s almost at the end of the block and I start running, those torn-ass sweatpants tearing and ripping even more and me holding them up with one fist, plastic bag of everything I own flapping and swinging and me calling hey hey hey and her brake lights go red.
She rolls the window down when I get there. “I’ll take you one place you need to go and that’s it.”
Rain’s been spitting down, on and off, but I let it hit me. I wanna feel the drops on my skin. It’s prison that does that, I want to tell her, that’s what started this whole argument, it’s not me, it’s the inside that does that. But I figure no way I can tell her what it’s like in there and have her understand, and probably it’s gonna be like that with everyone else now, too, and when I figure that out with the rain in my face I’m like, You see that, there’s a me that was in prison that no one else is gonna know for the rest of my life.
“There’s a time limit on my offer,” Khadeja says.
I pop the door and get in.
My one stop is to a big-and-tall on MLK Boulevard. We didn’t say nothing while we drove, just listened to all this music on the radio, there’d be a song and I’d be like, Crazy beat, or, She got a high voice, and Khadeja would say, That song’s been on the radio for months. But me all like it’s the first time, so after a while I stopped saying something about the songs. Most of Portland I never seen, either, so all the streets and neighborhoods is something new, but it’s just a city. Bright glass buildings and suits and ties and then blocks where round-hip Ethiopian mamas are walking white babies in strollers and then bombed-out blocks where there’s old brick walls and boarded windows, Chinese take-out boxes and ripped bags of kitchen garbage all over some sidewalks and alleys, and plenty places—under freeways and up against the fences and in the parks—got people sleeping by shopping carts lumpy and overfilled with clothes and boxes and milk jugs, like a dollar store threw up into ’um.
I get out the car. Stopped raining, so Khadeja rolls the window down and I lean back in and say, “I know you didn’t gotta do this, so thanks.�
� Even though I want to be like, You left us at his apartment and then we got fucking arrested. I think she sees how I’m thinking about that day again and she says, “So this was your one stop?”
I raise both my hands away from my body, showing all what I’m wearing, like what do you want me to do, and when I do Noa’s torn sweatpants swoop off my waist and puddle at my ankles. She laughs at my naked-ass thighs and then covers her mouth against it. “I can’t go anywhere like this,” I say. I bend to lift the pants back, and while I’m down I hear the sucking thump of the window closing back up and the clunk of the door locks and then Khadeja’s on the street standing next to me.
“I want to ask you something,” she says.
I get all crushed in my throat, I figure she gonna ask more about what it was like inside, guys screaming crazy shit until they went hoarse in the middle of the night, the ass-rape and salad-tossing and dick-sucking that was being forced on guys, and me sometimes scared I was next, but also how outside Khadeja’s car there’s way too much space and noise and things coming at me from every side. All of it rushing at me at once while I’m standing there. Me feeling like I need a small room to back into so I can see what’s coming from the front only. Must be there’s a look on my face that I don’t fix, because Khadeja closes her mouth.
She rubs a thumb over one of her eyes. “You know what? Let’s not do this here. We can just drive for a minute.”
I don’t know if it’s what I want. I already got this list in my head of what I got for do next: get new clothes, burner or a pay phone or some other way to call Justice, then see what he can do or who he knows can help me with a place to stay.
Sharks in the Time of Saviours Page 27