by Ursula Pflug
“I don’t believe you,” he says. “I can’t believe you are really such an asshole, Ruby. A real live honest to goodness asshole.”
“You just a kid,” I say, from where I’m sitting, frozen. The words come out of my mouth like they’re someone else’s, but I can’t stop them, I can’t help what they say.
And because, after all he is just a kid who loves me, he goes.
And in the morning he gets up and goes to work on a case he never comes back from.
sss
Benji is gone now, and I am alone in this room. This room, made, like any other room, of walls. Grey and carpeted, soft to mute the sounds that fear makes.
Before she left, Benji told me about her case, a man who said he’d come for sex. Somewhere he’d heard that’s what we were. People hear things. It took her a long time to bring him round to seeing what his real problem was. Himself. As usual. You get so tired.
Hookers. We had a big laugh over that one, me and Benji. It’s our souls we measure out here, one little piece at a time. Some nights I think I’d rather be out on the street, out there in the traffic, with the red tail lights.
We are inside, always inside, enclosed by soft grey walls of fear.
“I want to possess you,” he kept telling her. A real jalloo. Benji laughed, imitating him. She left me, went back to finish him off, still laughing. Maybe it was always the same, but tonight her laugh seems colder, tonight it freezes me so solid I feel I’m made not of ice, but of stone.
Possession. Only death possesses you now, Little, neither I nor the man who wanted too much of you. I never meant to get this old, not with these eyes. I’m just a kid, really; it was easy to be tough when I had you to laugh with. Used to be your thin arms would encircle me from behind and my skin would be alive again, just for a moment, before I went to sleep. Like it wasn’t for anyone else. Since Marianne.
Why do people want to buy sex? Sex is so easy to come by.
If I could, I would buy love.
If it were for sale.
No matter how much it cost.
I have seen the ugliest eyes. You get rubbed to raw in this place, ugliness rubbing itself up against you like sandpaper, jealous that you still hope. You get a habit to put up between you and them, you buy yourself designer eyes, fashionable and cold, empty as hell.
You was the best of all of us, Little. They couldn’t shovel in the money or The Blues fast enough for what you gave them. And they knew it. It made them proud, the ugly ones.
The ugly ones. It took an ugly one to know what I couldn’t, what you were worth. Made him so jealous he had to snap out that light if he couldn’t make it his own. But it could never be owned, that light. Not by him, not by me. Not by The Blues.
Sentiment. When the feeling’s gone, you replace it with sentiment. Cheap sentiment and superstition. No matter how many times you told me.
I really love you, Ruby, I really do.
And I survive. Used to wish I could die, used to wish I could get dead. Used to think I’d never live this long, not in this business. But since I’ve learned that you hang on, you hang on, dead as you might wish to get. I do not live so sharply anymore. My edges are worn and so I bounce, I don’t clatter now, I don’t shatter.
I remember one time me and you rode the bus together, going home to my place after we’d been out dancing all night. It was so late they were going to work already, the nine to fivers, and we started kissing, just to jack them up. It was easy to make them jealous of us, because we looked so happy; we were young and good looking and we made each other crazy.
I remember I used to mix my own colours of nail polish in those days and I used to try and get it to match your turquoise eyes. So we were sitting on this bus kissing and my hand was resting on your cheek and I took my tongue out of your mouth and pulled my face back just enough so I could see how well I’d matched it … and I had, exactly, until we got off the bus, because under the sky your eyes looked like they were lit from the inside, and they haven’t invented the nail polish yet that can do that.
I used to love to dress up with you and go out on the street and be stared at; it made me feel like a queen from another planet.
Now I think I’d like to be on an airplane with you. On the way to Japan, to a place like Kyoto: a raked garden, full of stillness.
Mostly I want not to be broken anymore, to no longer be afraid of winter because it makes everything come apart. I want to pull myself back towards the sun from this place where I am now; wherever it is, it’s scary.
Kaolani, from Kaua’i
WE SPENT ANOTHER WEEK together after we camped in Haleakalā, staying in the spare room of a tin roofed, one-storey house on a back street in Lahaina; one of those gravel streets under bedraggled coco palms, poi dogs asleep under cars, a corrugated tin wall around the yard you’d throw your laundry on to dry, after you’d washed it by hand in the empty lion-clawed bathtub that sat in the centre of the yard. I asked you why you didn’t just take it to the coin wash, and you said you hated laundromats; the reason being you used to go to the post office in Kaunakakai, years before when you lived on Moloka’i in the Hālawa Valley, to get your mail and read it while the laundry spun but nobody in your family wrote to you anymore, none of your friends back home in Canada, where we were both from. And so now laundromats reminded you of not having mail, of your abandonment.
The house belonged to a new acquaintance; you met Michael at May’s and an hour later anyone watching the two of you talk would’ve thought you were the oldest of friends. Michael was hardly ever home, and gave us the room happily and for free, or else you offered a little work in exchange. You had nothing either but you knew how to trade. Because of this he respected you. Just like May, or is that Mei—the Chinese woman in the restaurant who gave us free food because you’d repaired her door.
It was in the fancy Lahaina bars that people sneered at your bare dirty feet although lots of people in there had plenty worse. Maybe those waitresses wanted to sleep with you and you wouldn’t, and if that was the case I couldn’t really blame them.
You’d come in on a sailboat days before, up from Tahiti. Your friends were taking their boat from Lahaina to a dry dock in a hick town on the ‘Iao side to do necessary repairs to the hull; unlike sailing from Midway, they could do it two-handed. Why didn’t you and I hike through the crater, you’d meet your friends after, I could come along if I wanted, re-caulk the boat with the three of you; it was up to me.
Michael was half Portuguese, half Hawai’ian. He had a fishing boat, but he didn’t go out every day, and made the other half of his living by odd-jobbing and barter. In his yard he had a pomelo tree and an avocado tree, and he didn’t eat from either of them. We went to the park and collected fallen mangoes. Michael laughed. “Mangoes for the pigs, avocados for the dogs.” He had a friend across the road who used to take them to feed his animals. One night he came home with fresh mahi-mahi; you sliced it up sashimi-style and mixed wasabi for it, and I made a big bowl of guacamole out of Michael’s avos, first going to the store and buying tortilla chips and tomato and garlic. I’d meant to buy lemons too, but found fallen limes in front of a tree on the way. A Chinese woman came out of the house and I felt bad, but she said, “Take them all, they’ll just rot,” and was only a little bit condescending.
We drank Primo and smoked local pakalolo that Michael had. We felt lucky: usually people smoked imported Mexican; the Hawai’ian was so costly most of it went to the mainland or else you couldn’t afford it. Mexican was cheaper. I hated Primo and went back to the store for Kirin, using up almost all of the rest of the money I’d made working on the poultry farm with Lulu, but it was a celebration, although I’m not sure what we were celebrating. I suppose because we could. So quickly afterwards, celebration was no longer possible. Almost certainly, you knew. After we’d smoked I sliced up the sweetest mangoes and even Michael liked them, and after that he
ate pomelo and avocado every day.
“You have to eat the healthy food,” you said to him, “not the junk food,” and I wondered if you weren’t being a bit patronizing.
When Michael was home with his girl we’d go out to Mei’s restaurant. She had a back room for people like us, or at least, people like me. Mei understood immediately that you were different. I wonder how she did that? Maybe it was just her age—she was over forty and could read people as I couldn’t. All the young backpackers would chat and gossip in the back room; Lulu had discovered the place.
It was all a game to me, an As If. I wasn’t really living my life. But it’s as though I left a part of myself in that time, waiting for the moment when I could become a part of a community, have a sense of belonging. And that time is now. But I’m afraid of failing again, just like I did then, at the difficult task of being human.
I’d tried, of course, thinking, “This is just like high school…” and ordered tea and enormous almond cookies like everybody else, and maybe, I think now, I was more successful than I thought, coming at the difficult problem of being human. In that room, before I left, I reached across the table and took the hand of the dark-haired girl you’d slept with even though we were ostensibly together, and smiled.
I’m grateful; you were witness to the brittleness of my youth. How vulnerable I was, wearing my solitude and harmed quality on my sleeve in place of a heart. That you got to see that side of me I will never be able to forgive you. It is better to have the distance, to write to you. It is so easy to idolize the past, but perhaps all I say here is true.
I’m on holiday with our old friend Lulu, on my first island, Kaua’i, and not Maui, where you and I spent time together. Still, just being in Hawai’i reminds me of you so much I feel compelled to write. Hawai’i has changed, much of its wildness paved over by indistinguishable malls and hotels, even on the outer islands. The old Japanese men no longer sit in the beach parks, playing hanafuda. I wonder where they are now? Remember we sat with them once and asked them to teach us how to play? We got the basics that afternoon, under the tattered palms, sitting at the name-and-fire scored picnic table. But the nuances were endless. They finally got rid of us by threatening to play the next game for money, and we ran off, needing what few bills we had for takeout tempura and Kirin beer.
I unfold the page, look at your drawing I’ve kept all these years. The mouse is still so lifelike, but it doesn’t move. I’ll keep it forever. I’m already forgetting what you look like, except that your forehead was broad and tanned and high, and your big knotted hands much gentler than my father’s.
Before she left for her solitary hike through the Alaka’i swamp, Lulu looked at me. “Did you call?”
I shook my head. “I have to write, try and sort it out one more time.”
“Don’t write too long,” Lulu said. “You know what the verdict was, not so bad.”
“That doesn’t mean he was innocent; his lawyer might’ve just been good.”
“Tomorrow is his release date. If you don’t call today he might be gone. There’s no harm in it. If he’s not what you thought, you can change your mind.”
I do not know how to tell this story. Hence I will try writing it as if it were a story, in third person, with made-up names. For write it I must. If I don’t, I won’t be able to decide.
sss
His brown eyes met hers across the yard, across the fairy tale crowd at the free temple dinner. She had gone inside to help in the kitchen, but just as she looked towards the door she saw him coming out. He was deeply tanned and wore a white cotton shirt, loose and unironed. She noticed him immediately. They passed each other, but he only glanced at her. In the temple kitchen she arranged fruit on platters: lemons, apples, papaya, mango, pomelo, liliko’i. Apple bananas, each banana the size of a thumb so that a bunch of bananas, a hand as they are called here, really does look like a hand, being almost exactly the same size. Guavas. Small as tennis balls, they fit in your hand, brown on the outside, green and slushy on the inside. Strawberry guavas that are smaller, perhaps the size of huge farm grown strawberries, scarlet and smooth-skinned. She took the platters out and set them on the table and looked for him but he was gone.
After the dishes were done she caught her ride back to Baldwin Park, where, as most nights, there was a fire and drumming as Scorpio appeared in the sky. She watched the fire and then him, standing directly across the flames, noticed how his forehead was so smooth and large and his hands were large too, but very gentle as he took an offered drum.
He came to her campsite that night, a secret campsite Lulu knew, under ironwood trees a quarter mile from the park.
“Hello,” she said.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes.”
She turned on her flashlight. He had come through the woods without one. She was glad. She didn’t want anyone knowing where she was camped.
He showed her a drawing he had made, of a mouse.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I just sort of knew.”
His mouse was very mousy. It had soft brown hair and jumped off the page and under the covers with them. They made love right away, in silent relief. Afterwards they went to the Chinese restaurant to eat, walking across the cane fields to get to town, because it was shorter than taking the road. She didn’t even wonder how Mei’s restaurant, which was usually in Lahaina, was now in Pa’ia. Or perhaps they’d walked the dirt tracks through moonlit cane fields for hours, and it only felt like minutes. Maybe it was because the mouse came too. The mouse was a very good supper companion, making them like each other and feel good without saying very many words. They ate in the shadow of the mountain.
Hitchhiking up the mountain the next day, they walked between rides, along an unpaved road, a gravel track really, covered in yellow crescent shaped leaves; neither of them knew what the tree was called. She walked beside Jim. She didn’t know him very well although they were new lovers; the leaves were like the fingernail clippings of a family of giants. She wanted to say something important to Jim, something that would make him remember her. She hadn’t eaten any mushrooms herself. It began to rain. They were hungry and, passing through a village, went into a café to eat. The proprietor scowled at Jim, more than at her, but served them coffee and fried egg sandwiches nonetheless.
She’d feel this peculiar chagrin in restaurants with Jim. It was the only time they were ever in public together. The Chinese one in either Lahaina or Pa’ia was the exception. Was he barefoot? Did he smell? She didn’t much care, but it was tiresome and she didn’t understand it. In Mei’s restaurant, the mouse had tea with them; in other restaurants it stayed in his pocket. It’s always a tea party when you have a mouse along, even if you’re not wearing your mad hat. Jim talked about nothing and she talked about nothing, both careful to obscure their pasts, to cloud their trail. But that wasn’t it; it was as if they really didn’t have pasts. On Maui, she often found herself telling people she was from Kaua’i, and realizing, in a shocked kind of way that it was true. She’d been on Kaua’i for eight months and then met Lulu; they’d come here together. She’d been in Hawai’i almost a year altogether. When you’re so young that’s a long time, and each experience in that year so vivid her father paled behind it, grew ghostlike. But not entirely.
She realized, years later with Lulu in Koke’e that she’d loved Jim, even though she hadn’t known it at the time. She’d liked him a lot, the sex had been great, and she’d felt like they’d known each other, which almost never happened to Tanya. Somehow, though, she hadn’t put this together as love.
sss
“Every time I bend over I have this major realization,” she said, pulling her head back out of the waterfall. On a stone lay their toothbrushes, the expensive health food store shampoo. Her one luxury.
“Like what?” Jim had made a camp fire and she was drying her hair after swimmin
g. They were going to eat breadfruit and coconut, both of which Tanya had found. Tanya could tell by looking at a coconut what stage it was inside, milky or hard, or the puddingy in-between stage called spoon meat that some people loved.
They’d done their hike through Haleakala, and now, on the way back out, they’d left the trail and were camping on parkland, or maybe it was private land. They didn’t know; it was such a vast tract that nobody could possibly find them. Waterfall after waterfall came splashing down the mountain like a stairway from heaven; mist and rainbows crowning the treetops of the rainforest like damp halos. They had been there for three days; the crater hike itself had been another three.
“What if he kills me?” she wondered aimlessly, and reached up onto the cliff ledge and took down the rubber cervix-covering item and put it in.
“Never say how long you were anywhere. It breaks the spell, the way an alteration of memory can redeem everything,” Tanya said, and Jim smiled. She took off her sandals she’d wet getting out of the pool. They were leather huaraches; she put them by the fire to dry. She had nothing on. She dried her hair; which was long and thin and brown, with the blue towel and then sat down at the fire and took over cleaning the seeds out of the dope, some kind of Maui Wowie given to her by one of her young Hawai’ian buddies. She had impressed Jim with this, that she knew how to score local dope from locals, although he’d pulled off the same trick, meeting Michael within days of his arrival from Midway. He’d explained he’d once lived on Moloka’i; most of his friends there had been Hawai’ian.
They made love and lay in the sun and baked and swam in the pools beneath waterfalls and occasionally Tanya wondered, when, as it must, it would end, and vaguely, whether he would kill her, although he had never given any indication. Perhaps she’d just seen too many horror movies as a child, horror movies on television and the other kind, the kind she hid in the laundry room to escape from. Now, here, it was only at this moment that they passed through her skin, her outer membrane, that they made her truly fearful. The terror she’d had to suppress at the time.