Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  I don’t understand, I want to say again, but I still can’t speak, right? Something keeps sucking the sound from my throat.

  Mom moves the song to another. She starts slapping a beat on the body of the ‘ukulele. Slapping and rolling her knuckles on the body like it’s an ipu. Then she goes back and jams out a few chords. So hard I worry the strings will snap. Then while they’re still ringing in the air she’s slapping the ‘ukulele body again, tapping and slapping and rolling.

  The song has become kahiko. The ancient hula form.

  And the song asks: What are we doing here. In this land.

  In my mind I see: Water finding its way from the top of rain-pounded gulches in the mountains to the leaves of green kalo in the valley. To the thirsty earth. I see fish and flower beds and symbiosis. My hands in that same soil, tilting the balance ever so slightly, and the green roaring back.

  The song asks again: what are we doing here. Take the balance we’re building at the farm, I say. Say it with my hands and hips in the hula. The song is asking and I answer. Make my palms flat and press them down through the air as I rock my hips and step slowly, and turn back. I’m not working hard but I’m dizzy, motion-sick. Something is in me. Mom goes harder on the ‘ukulele. She’s slapping and knuckling the body. She’s hitting chords and notes all over the strings, right? It’s the farm, I answer, it’s the land, what we can be and what the islands can become. In the hula I pluck from the air like I’m plucking kalo. I sweep down and across my body like rain through the dirt and rivers. The old ways again, land feeding, land eating. That old hum. I pivot on my heels. Mom goes on, the song is swelling with a rainstorm of notes and a beat that’s turning before our eyes. I’ve never seen her play like that, so fast and precise; it’s not sad anymore. I see my hands as I sweep with them. My hands. Stained again to the quick, this time with soil instead of the climbing chalk they’d been dirtied with in San Diego. I roll my hips and shoot my feet out and back to the beat. I drop to my knees and turn my arms each way before setting them down. I bow. Mom strikes the last notes, faster than the notes she started with.

  There’s a rip tide of silence. I slam my ass back into the chair. Like, almost break it, almost fall over. The sensations of where I am start to creep back into recognition. The coqui frogs go.

  “Mom?” I ask. “What just happened?”

  Her eyes are larger and whiter than before. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never played that before in my life.” She cradles the ‘ukulele back down to her lap. Opens her hands and wiggles her fingers. As if to be sure they’re still there.

  I ask her did she see it, too. Did she feel it.

  “Yes,” she says.

  I think of all the other hula that had been in me. From that first night, the cafeteria, to college and Van, to this. Alive alive alive, goes my heart.

  “Kaui,” Mom says slowly, “what is happening on that farm?”

  37

  MALIA, 2009

  Honoka‘a

  These days I try not to hope too much. I’d started to believe that, whatever gods there are, our future isn’t tied to them, not our present, not our past. They’ve become nothing to me, without Nainoa. And isn’t it foolish to expect anything, one way or the other, anyway? Isn’t that the thing that’s always undone people? And yet here I am, hoping again, itchy with it, because of what happened in the music last night. Something is happening down here, I don’t know what, something of the gods and Nainoa and us. So I’m here, sitting in the unlined bed of Kimo’s pickup with my daughter, our backs against the cab as we face rear to the road behind us, passing a thermos of coffee back and forth, the faint taste of its plastic like opening an old refrigerator, underneath that taste the good rinse of the Kona beans, we pass it back and forth when the truck’s not bucking through the graveled potholes of the farm road. We have bandannas over our noses and mouths to block the dust from the ride, making us into bandits, or the Bloods and Crips on Kaui’s rap albums. Through the bandannas everything smells like old cotton and coffee, and we lift the cloths up enough to sip the mug, then drop the bandannas back over our faces and pass the thermos to each other. Road dust churns in our wake. The truck bucks again and again. We take a corner a little fast and Kaui almost tumbles over, sloshes coffee on her fingers and the thigh of her jeans. “That fucking fuck,” she hollers.

  “You mean your uncle?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Fuck him and his driving. He’s trying to kill us.”

  “Pass me the coffee if you’re not going for it,” I say. Just as I take a sip, we hit a smooth section and I drink long, smack my lips, make an ah sound after I swallow. “That wasn’t so hard. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”

  “Whatever,” Kaui says.

  “How far down is the farm?”

  “Almost there.”

  And then we are. Clearing the final corner, I see that the high grass and old cane and eucalyptus trees are chopped back and away and there’s a flat, wide field of a hill, the domed glass greenhouse in the center of the plot, pipes kinking up and down into the ground around the property like a half-buried skeleton, a smaller shed to the side. Raised platforms all around the greenhouse, a riot of elephant-eared taro rising from each platform. A man with a wide-brimmed, tall woven hat, old-school Hawaiian country-farmer style, sand-colored boots and grubby jeans, balding shirt, strides to the truck.

  “You’re late.” He nods to Kaui.

  “Sorry,” Kaui says in that flat way she uses on me, too, when she wants me to know she doesn’t mean it.

  “I bet,” the man says. He’s got curly whiskers patchy all over his chin and dark cheeks, thick eyebrows, serious stares; Hawaiian-Okinawan, I figure.

  “You probably just finished shitting anyway,” Kaui says. She hands him the thermos. “Was it a soft-serve morning, or more like a German sausage?” She hops from the pickup bed with her backpack and snatches the thermos back. I swing each leg over the tailgate and step down off the bumper.

  “This the ‘ohana, then, yeah,” the man says to me, to Augie. Augie gets out of the truck cab. Kaui chatters for a minute with Kimo and then the truck starts off, Kimo’s arm cocked out and throwing a shaka sign before the truck bucks through the first dusty turn and is gone.

  The man is Hoku and he shows me the farm, what he and Kaui have been doing. It’s all aquaponics and biodigesters, build-outs just getting started for a solar array and micro-windmills that hang like tree leaves and spin the smallest breezes. He explains it all and I’m in and out, not catching all of it, not so interested in much of what he’s saying. It’s a farm, what is there, really, to understand? The whole time we’re touring he’s got Kaui at work already, shoveling cow manure into a large black cylinder that she tumbles with a double-handed crank, or she’s out pruning plants and wrestling with pipes. She’s got her hair lashed up into a topknot, body flexing with each punch of the shovel, eyes squinting against the threads of the pipe, the back of her black T-shirt already calicoed with sweat.

  Hoku laughs. “You don’t get it, yeah?”

  “Looks like a small farm to me,” I say, fingering the leaves of one of the taro plants. “Kalo” is the other name for it, the one I prefer, the one that makes me think of night marchers and Pele and ‘aumakua, and there you are again, waiting in the part of my heart that rests until everything is quiet, then suddenly jumps.

  “Everything gotta start somewhere,” Hoku says. “Everything big starts small.”

  “You ever actually do work yourself?” I say. “Or you’re mostly a full-time tour guide?” I give him an acid smile. Kaui is wrenching on another pipe, arms going like the inside of an engine, broad and strong and full of sun like her keiki days. I remember. Augie is standing next to her, hair ruffled by the wind.

  “You charming, just like your daughter, yeah,” Hoku says. “Easy, Hawaiian. I was just showing you around quick one time.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say.

  “You don’t get it, yeah?”<
br />
  “What is there to get?”

  “Your daughter. I hate for say it,” Hoku says, “but she figured this out.”

  “Figured what out?”

  “The whole thing,” Hoku says. “The way to chain it all together, plus this new stuff she’s making. All the designs.” He talks again about aquaponics, the biodigester, the kalo feeding from the waste of fish feeding from the plants, and on and on: a cycle, he says, twirling his finger. It’s everything at once, the whole system feeding itself without intervention.

  “Right here,” he says. “It’s perfect.” He steps off the raised platform under the shade of the materials shack. “But girl’s, like, selling everyone on it. Gonna change everything in farming, I tell you. Just gotta make ’um work bigger. She got plenty ideas now.” After a few steps toward the place where Kaui is working, Hoku turns back. “You not coming?”

  It’s almost as if a switch has been turned on: a warm excitement and guilt juicing through me at the same time. She didn’t get this capable overnight. These abilities—she’d been doing something extraordinary, all those days when we were watching Noa instead. Bit by bit she got bigger. Quiet and furious. We never really paid attention, did we? Now look at you, Kaui.

  “I’m going to stay,” I say. “Just a minute. Give me a minute.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Hoku says. “Stay in the shade, grab one drink from the cooler if need.”

  “Right,” I say, shading my eyes with my hand so I can see her better.

  He goes the rest of the way out to my daughter and together they move from one task to another: slicing open parts of a large black drum—a water tank or something else—adding rubber pieces to it, fitting pipes, dragging scrap metal upstream, and then Kaui and Hoku talking about how to make something from it, her fierce gaze locking on an engine they have set up on a board straddling two sawhorses. I’ve never seen Kaui this way, never felt her this way: the whole farm, the whole situation, like an extension of the tendons and muscles of her body.

  But then I notice Augie. He’s not standing with her anymore, she’s given him space, and so he’s standing off by the aquaponic section, the huge, crowded bins of growing kalo. He does a strange thing then: he leans over, pressing his forehead gently against one of the elephant-ear leaves, and as I watch he leans farther and farther into the plant, until the whole front of his head has disappeared into the stalks.

  There’s a feeling, a deep green feeling, and a music. I feel myself lifting, it’s almost as if I’m in my body and outside it at the same time. Something’s happening.

  “Augie,” I say, starting to walk toward him, even though I know he won’t answer, it’s pointless, “what is it?”

  Augie holds a hand up, his head still lost in the stalks and shadow, the leaves draped over his shoulder as if consoling him. But when he holds the hand up, there’s something about the gesture, two fingers barely apart, two other fingers closed, that’s more deft than he’s been for quite some time. A controlled looseness, is what it is. Faculties. He pulls his head back out.

  “Babe,” he says.

  I almost trip on myself. Babe, a word he hasn’t said in such a long time, so long I’d forgotten what it meant to hear it. We had always had us, Augie and I, and our time together had always felt like a braiding, a braiding of our essences against each other tighter and tighter no matter what was being torn down around us. More than anything, what I’d missed most all these months was that feeling, and I realized it was the feeling of home.

  “Babe,” he says again. As if we’d never missed each other all this time. “I gotta show you something.”

  I want to speak but say nothing. I step closer to him. His hand grasps my arm just above the elbow and pulls me into the kalo—and when my forehead touches the leaves I feel it.

  It’s the same as what was there last night, in the song with Kaui, buzzing through my bones when I played the ‘uke. Where I touch the leaves and stalks, I feel a thousand voices, chanting. Yes. I grasp the stalks, I bury my face with Augie. The chanting and the singing. I know the language even if this is the first time I hear it this way, a language of righteousness and cycles, giving and taking, aloha in the rawest form. Pure love. The chant grows in numbers, the way talk at a large gathering of people shifts from individual conversations into a babbling hum, so that what I’m touching now is more than voices, more than a chant, it’s a hum of energy, and I can feel the hum extending into everything around us: the kalo in the field, I feel its green hunger for sunlight and the clamp and flex of its body against the damp soil and the way it is drinking tongues of water that find their way to it from the fish, and the fish, the trill and beat of their tails, a constant rock this way and that as their bodies muscle their dance through the water, then the mud on the edges of the tank and past it the grass, all of it raising up and feasting on the sun, the heat, the rain. It echoes back until it’s almost too much to bear, too much to fit into one mind. I’m starting to lose myself in it, it’s raging around me, it’s starting to drown ideas I have even about myself, where I am, my name—

  Augie’s rough hand pulls me back from the leaves. There he is, examining me, his eyes gentle and full, the way they used to be. All of him is there. “You felt ’um?” he asks, and I tell him yes, yes, of course I did.

  “Been there this whole time, yeah,” he says. “You didn’t know.”

  “What’s been there?” I ask.

  “All of that,” he says. “All of it.”

  I realize, finally, what it’s been like in his head all this time, how if this is what has been in there, in its most loud and central form, roaring over every part of his mind . . . it would unmake him. How it started slowly and came on bigger. That he felt it on O‘ahu while I didn’t, that there’s something Kaui felt, too, something that she awakened on the porch, her and Noa’s ‘ukulele, and now here we are. She unlocked it. This place, this land, unlocked it. A wall of chanting sound storming over everything else, a demand from the island to be realized—no, released—this way. This is just the start, isn’t it, but this is everything, all of it from the beginning. Stick me in the heart with a spear, the way I understand Nainoa for the first time. It must have been so lonely, all his life, with all of this.

  “Augie,” I whisper.

  “What?”

  “Right now,” I say, “is it you?”

  “I don’t understand,” he says, but I don’t need him to answer. I can see. Oh my Augie, I kiss him. Push right into him and feel his chest, the way the muscle has thinned to a shallow dish over ridged bone, but still it thuds with blood and breath—I press mine against his, and our teeth click as I shift my mouth over my Augie, let my lips slide sloppy into place, us breathing together. He’s here right now, all of him, and it is enough. Something is released.

  “Oh my God,” I say, pulling back from the kiss, and I laugh. “Your breath stinks.”

  38

  KAUI, 2009

  Honoka‘a

  We beat our run out on the road. And the road it beats us back. The chopping pattern of our running shoes on the blacktop, me and Dad on our eighth mile, and with each stride the earth drives back into our bones and muscles. Sugarcane and eucalyptus scroll by and occasionally, farther out in the fields, there are rust-cancered mill houses and zinc storage-sheds getting swallowed by leaves. Scrubby green unused farmland tilts down toward the faraway cliffs. Okay, and then beyond, the blue ocean flickers with whitecaps from the trade winds. We keep running and we keep hurting, right? Through our toe bones. Through the knots of our calves and the stiff bands of our thighs. All the way up through our bellies goes the beat. Tff tff tff is the sound. Each time we stride now there’s a sort of gasping from both of our throats. I bet that’s the wrong way to run, losing breath like that. But I don’t care about being wrong. Or losing breath. I just want to go.

  Okay, still running, me and Dad, just like we did at the start when I came home. Back when I figured maybe just running would make him better. You run hard
enough and long enough and everything inside is muted under the torrent of your body moving blood and oxygen and your head buzzes bright. Back when I first came home I was ready to get lost with Dad. And I did some days. Some nights.

  Then the hurt unlocked itself, Dad and the land. Now whole days go where he’s like he was before. There’s no muttering, okay? There’s no set of staring eyes, as empty as the rusted sheds we’re running past. There’s no shitting himself or wandering off into the dark green. No. We have all of him now: Pull my finger, he ordered at dinner on Saturday. And after our run yesterday morning he said: I been running so hard I think your mom gonna die.

  Who, by the way. Mom. It hasn’t been since my hana bata days that I’ve seen her like she is now. For a while a part of her had given up. She’d lost everything and was only continuing to wake up because it’s what she’d always done. Or maybe she thought there was something in Dean and me that she could live for. I don’t know about that. But I do know Noa will always be her favorite; it wasn’t even about Noa, really, or at least not just the person. For Mom, Noa was a son but he was also the legends that came with him. How those contracted everything that hurt us—the broke years, the move to the city, the shit jobs she and Dad had—into a single point of purpose. And that purpose was so big she didn’t have to understand it to know she had an important part to play. Big destiny is a thing you get drunk on.

  Tff tff tff. Me and Dad still pounding down the road. Something shifts and crackles in the trees when we run by, where the bushes and branches are spiky and low to the ground. My own sweat is wetting my eyelashes, tickling the muscles in my neck, and the road humps up hills and rolls down and curves away. Orange late light. We keep running.