The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  Pomai had shot her last three teenage years up as a signal flare to her parents—her father busy playing freedom fighter with the Kanaka Maoli, her mother nose-deep in legal briefs; dad with his weekends gathering signatures at endless rallies, mom with her thin-lipped smile and another delivery dinner night at the office, and in between Pomai, losing her schoolbooks, quietly seething at the cliquey cunts in her gym class, burning enough blunts to get a whale stoned, dropping from prep school to public school to home school in less than five semesters—but swiping through the ashes, she’d found a direction of sorts. California calling, USC. She’s headed there two years late, a twenty-year-old freshman only starting to get things straight.

  But this first: the weekend, the surf, the long, humming drive from Niu Valley to the North Shore.

  The sun has just begun to burn the bottom of the sky when Pomai arrives at the beach parking lot and hops from her truck. Her bare feet grind against the sand-dusted blacktop. A boom sounds off, just over the ridge of the lot, the way Pomai imagines a bomb drop: round and sudden and knotted with violence. She clamps her board against her ribs. All across the lot, car roofs are racked—rhino chasers, fish tails, old-school longboards—the fins inverted and pointing heavenwards, the surfboards sharp as spears and ghostly white in the low morning. The booming sounds again, followed by the sizzle of the ocean sliding up the beach.

  Pomai is at the edge of the lot, about to crest the hill, when she sees her father approaching: his stubbled chin; his shallow brown chest and paunched stomach; those round Hawaiian eyes, foggy red from the sea. Pomai feels a flare of frustration at her temples. She’d been hoping not to see anybody she knew, even in the crowded waters of winter, but he’s seen her, now, and anyway, there’s nowhere to go. Pomai raises her chin and sets her face like concrete.

  “Po-Po,” Rylan says. “It’s been a while.”

  Pomai leans away, spits into the bushes. “Come on,” she says. “Don’t call me that.”

  “I forgot,” Rylan says. He closes one eye, as if appraising her. “How’s it?”

  “You forgot I don’t like to be called something that sounds like a cop or baby shit?”

  Pomai shakes her head, then nods towards the ridge, the surf they can’t see. “Were you out?” Another wave hits. Pomai feels goose bumps coast up her forearms. “Sounds hectic.”

  “It’s not too bad, if you know how for ride it. How you been?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Pomai says.

  “How’s your mother?”

  Pomai shrugs. “Busy.”

  Rylan blows out a long breath. Pomai’s heard the breath before, cool with his disapproval, longer every time he judges her.

  “I gotta piss,” Rylan says.

  “Take your time,” Pomai says, and starts walking towards the sand.

  “You going to wait for me?” Rylan asks to her back.

  She throws a hand up, over her shoulder, without turning. “Maybe if you hurry back.”

  Pomai crests the hill. The surf is firing. Stretching out in front of her, beyond the beach—its cool bright sand dotted with lumps of clothing and half-empty backpacks—dark swells of ocean roll in from the deep, walls of water that mist at their peak then wallop the reef below. A cluster of surfers float at Second Break. Their bodies look tiny against the swells.

  A moment later Rylan has returned, and from the top of the ridge he sees his daughter in her final preparations. Pomai is crouched, combing the wax on her six-six, the board dirty with other sessions. Her shoulders are brawny and run through as much with hula as with surfing, and when he sees her like that he sees the blood of Hawai’i and knows Pomai’s mother hasn’t spoiled all of her.

  In their early days everything was different. Rylan and Keala had just had Pomai—she was maybe three, four?—when Hi’ilawe was found noosed with electrical cord, creaking from a rafter in his house with eviction notices stacked on the counter, food-stamp card taped to his note. I don’t know why it’s so hard, it said. But I’m not going to fail anymore. Rylan and Keala had always talked about the Sovereignty Movement, how and where it made sense to try and reclaim their annexed kingdom. But the way Hi’ilawe had left, coupled with that week’s evening news of the Kanaka Maoli—their malo loincloths and pa’u skirts, standing together in front of the black breath and industrial blades of the government—was all the convincing they’d needed. Within a month, Rylan and Keala were out on the street, brown and gleaming with the work of the Movement, dancing and chanting at the capitol, picketing at the Modern Community Development Sites, marching at the Highway Construction Zones. Their eyes burned with the fluorescent light of late-night strategy sessions, debates over how to beat gerrymandering and push another petition through to the ballot.

  The years went, the years were hard, but there were little victories, and then bigger ones-first official US apologies for the annexation, then the return of Kaho’olawe. Rylan was flush with the possibility, their small ax chopping at the big tree of the state, but something had changed in Keala.

  “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” she said one night. “The military bases aren’t going anywhere, neither are the hotels. Who owns all the factories? Who has all the good jobs?”

  “Thanks so much, Miss Attorney,” Rylan said.

  “But don’t you see?” Keala said. “It’s only because I went to Berkeley that I’m a lawyer now.”

  She could list a litany of Maoli failures: its leaders had been bought out by the state, it was disorganized, it was male dominated. Rylan always told her these were just the growing pains of any movement, but in private, he thought she was looking for a way out. She was hapa-haole anyway, half her family from Arizona. He’d been blind to it because he was young and stupid but now he could see she’d always been using the Movement as a chance to pretend she was full Hawaiian and not just an approximation. And so she slowly began to break away, to poison his daughter’s mind with talk of opportunity on the mainland, of how much more efficient it was, how much cheaper, that you could get in a car and drive from one state to another, and that somehow, when you were more American, everything got easier.

  But she hadn’t gotten all of his daughter. Rylan had kept just enough of Pomai. She’d learned from Rylan and there was mana in her yet, the flex and pump of hula, and surfing, and she knew plenty of their language, could hold whole conversations in their real tongue. He sees this while he stands above, watching her finish the wax combing and then heft the board under her arm. Now he grabs his board and joins her on the beach.

  Rylan can hear the way Pomai is breathing. “You ready for this?” “Of course,” Pomai says. “I’ve ridden bigger than you think.”

  Then they’re in the water, at their knees, and Pomai has stopped to watch again the cracking surf. She’s nervous, Rylan thinks.

  “Every time before I get in,” Rylan says, “I think about where surfing came from. Our ali’i. Our blood, you know? Our kings.”

  Pomai’s still watching the surf. “There were queens, too,” she says. “Everyone seems to forget that.” From Second Break comes a faint whooping, like a war cry. A double overhead wave assaults the lineup, tossing a late-dropping surfer. He disappears into the white water. “Anyway, it’s just a history lesson,” Pomai says. “It’s not going to keep me floating out there.”

  She swipes at her forehead, her eyes, with the palm of her free hand. “Rip looks strong today.” Pomai pulls herself up onto her board. “Hope you’re ready to paddle.”

  In the water Pomai surges ahead and arrives at the lineup far before her father. All the surfers are floating together, sit-straddling their boards, waiting for the next set. Pomai sees her father, far back and coming on slowly, each arm rising and slapping down to pull the water. All around, the ocean rises and falls beneath them, the slow-breathing lungs of an animal. Water gurgles and chuffs against the boards. Smaller swells roll under, breaking far closer to shore; then a set rises, the dark of new waves headed to Second Break, to the lineup
of waiting surfers. It’s what she came for.

  Pomai and three others leave the lineup. Almost immediately Pomai sees it’s a mistake. The wave is close to fifteen feet at the peak; she’s ridden maybe ten feet, twelve at the biggest. She and the others are quiet, each paddling for the deepest spot, jockeying for calling rights. Pomai pulls across the group, into the deepest position—she’s surfed this break so many times it’s automatic, the way a person can forget their commute even as they’re driving it—so she’s the first to feel the lunge of the surf, the wave rising behind and hollowing out below. The others pull up. She strokes hard and presses down on the board and slides into the wave and the ocean spits at her all over as she launches, and for the first few feet it is exactly like jumping off a cliff. But then the rail of her board catches smooth and she leans into the curling face and glides down into the blue cave of glass, the mouth closing even as she chases, and then it is farther ahead, and smaller even, and just as the cave collapses around her, she shoots through the spume and into the sun, the wave thundering its last into foam. She slides to the mushy shoulder of the surf, where onlookers chee-hoo and her blood bangs in her throat with joy.

  Out in the channel, Rylan has arrived, and he’s watching it all. She’s so angry, Rylan thinks. He’d believed they were removed from the era when Pomai had found a new way to ruin every opportunity she was given, when she’d spent her nights at friends’ houses and in their cars, at beaches and parking lots and streets, bludgeoning herself with chemicals and—although Rylan has no proof—sex. The fights with other girls, the pathetic grades, again and again, Rylan remembers all of this. Much of that was Keala, he knows it now. You take his daughter away and leave her with a tired, compromised mother . . . Pomai had never been so angry when they were all together. And after the divorce, when Pomai was acting up the most, impossible to find, sharp-tongued when available, there were still times she’d snuck into his apartment when she could’ve gone anywhere, even back to her mother.

  The anger, then, Rylan tells himself, didn’t come from him.

  And look at Pomai now. Strongest surfer in the water, liquid hips and quick feet, so much of that from him. She’d finished school and had a job. Things would get better for her, things would get better for them. He just had to say the right words now and she’d soften up.

  Pomai has paddled back to the channel, starts to pass him for the lineup.

  “Hey, not bad,” Rylan calls out. Pomai keeps paddling. “Pretty good for your biggest wave ever, yeah?”

  Pomai pulls up now, turns towards him. Rylan sees eyes that are bright, like she’s swallowed electricity. “It’s unreal out here today,” she says. “But I’m just getting started.” She nods towards the inside break, where five-foot waves are wrecking ten-year-olds and Occa-sionals. “You been sticking to the inside?”

  Rylan laughs off the insult. “I was riding out here when you was still in hana-bata days. When you was trying to take off your diapers and run around naked.”

  “Those days are long gone,” Pomai says.

  “Ah, come on,” Rylan says. “Loosen up a little, okay? We don’t see each other so much, we might as well make it fun.” But she doesn’t smile when he says it.

  “No,” she says. “We’re not going to make this fun. You don’t get to do this. You don’t get the easy, happy day.”

  “Damn,” he says. “I was just trying for enjoy the surf.”

  Yes, Dad, there you go, turn it to me, Pomai thinks. She knows what comes next: I didn’t raise you to be this way. It was always his favorite, an easy way to extraction, and she’d always wanted to say: right, you didn’t raise me to be this way. You didn’t raise me to be any way at all. Pomai wants to ask Rylan where he was when it was after midnight on a Saturday and she needed someone to be waiting up for her, refusing to turn out the lights. Or when she’d seen in the mirror that swimming and surfing were thickening her back into a slab of muscle that strained against the seams of her blouses and she’d panicked that she’d never turn herself into a ribbon of sex like Nicky and all the girls in Aloha Club-where was he then? Or when she’d pulled back from Hana in his bedroom, slipped her hand from his erection and said she wasn’t ready, and a week later she was a slut somehow, the label echoing around her in the long empty shines of recess halls, where was her father then?

  For a moment Pomai is fourteen again and in the halau, practice before the Merrie Monarch, locked in line with the other girls and boys, all moving their feet and arms and hips in time to the rolling bump and tap of the ipu, the chants of the kumu, the dancers bouncing and turning on their knees, flipping and sweeping their arms, the kumu telling of the life of the gods, the dancers calling back when the kumu asked, and all of it she can feel running like water from her into the same river that her father draws from, the place where he talks of the old Hawai’i. Pomai had been proud then and heated in her heart for being a part of the same place as her father, and she’d waited for him the next day at the airport, ready for him to join her at the competition. Surely he wouldn’t miss this, the Merrie Monarch tickets sold out for months ahead, the stadium seating filled. But Rylan never showed. It was just her and her mother, and by the time Pomai had taken stage with her halau, when they were supposed to answer the kumu, Pomai found she no longer had the voice, and she failed, the halau failed, and when she left the stage she knew it. If she could go back, the girl she was would still be up there onstage, waiting for the father who would never show.

  “I don’t want to pretend,” Pomai says, “that we’re a happy family.” Rylan blows again, that long sigh Pomai’s heard so many times. “So start in, then,” he says. “Gimme all the words your mom been giving you, about how I’m this or that.”

  “I don’t need Mom’s words. I’ve got my own.”

  “Do you?”

  “Dad—” Pomai starts. But then she stops. “You know what, fuck it, I’m leaving for California next week.”

  She sees the words bolt through Rylan’s spine. “What?”

  “USC,” Pomai says.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Everyone’s gone,” Pomai says. “Tracy’s gone, Nicky-them, they’re all doing something with themselves. And here I am.”

  “You can do plenty with yourself here,” Rylan says.

  “What, like you did?”

  Rylan clamps his jaw shut. Pomai can see the flex of his cheek. She notices, too, how far they’ve drifted in the ocean. It’s not just the tide on top, but something deeper and more insistent that’s steadily taking them away. “I done plenty good here,” Rylan says.

  “Look around you,” Pomai says. “You’re a part-time electrician. You only get paid if some haole lets you work on his house. I’m no better. You should see me smile at Sunset’s: another burger for you, sir, your joke about my ass is so funny, let me make sure I wear my V-neck—”

  “I know,” Rylan says. “I know it’s like that. What do you think I’m fighting with the Maoli for?”

  “So you can hide from me and Mom.”

  “Who told you that? You don’t know nothing,” Rylan says. “Who was there when you first walked? Who’s the one who took you up at night when you was crying, who didn’t always have to work in the morning? Shit.” He raises his arms to encompass everything around them, “Who taught you to surf?”

  “I taught myself,” Pomai says. “You were gone more than you were around.”

  “That’s your mom telling you that,” Rylan says. “That’s school counselors and state workers—”

  “There’s no one else, Dad,” Pomai says. “Not this time. Only me. God,” Pomai says, gritting her teeth.

  And then she paddles away.

  Rylan sits and stares after Pomai, rage thudding through his skull. She’s moving strong to the waves and he’s slowly sliding away. Her words are still there in his head. Something in him closes on itself and falls like a runaway elevator.

  No, he thinks. You’re wrong.

  This island. Thi
s damn island. Is still taking from me.

  Rylan lies chest-down and paddles after Pomai. The water is cold and heavy through his hands. A herd of clouds rushes by, shadows sliding over the waves. He paddles. She’s there, flattened on her board, the white bottoms of her feet bobbing in and out of the water. A set is rolling in and he can see his daughter going for the third wave back. Rylan follows, closer with every pull of his hands through the water.

  The wave approaches. Wind ripples across the face as it curves and rises, dark and massive, one of the biggest waves yet. Pomai is positioning for it, and Rylan’s only a few strokes behind. Yes, he thinks. He wants it to crush them both. He wants it to pound the whole island and drag it away: all the white hotels on the coast; all the State Department buildings; all the freeways, the traffic lights; all the haole houses, big and elegant as palaces; the hundreds of carpenters he’d met from Ohio or Arizona who’d moved on a whim and banked more in their first year than he had in ten; all the clean smiles and dirty cash and stupid lu’aus, as if Hawai’i was a casino and not a kingdom. It had taken so much from him. Now his daughter, too, had lost sight of the real islands, the ones underneath. Pain flames through the muscles at the base of Rylan’s neck, goes to the skeleton, to the nerves. He’s up next to Pomai, the noses of both their boards lunging forward with each stroke. He’s beaten her to the lane.

  “This one’s not yours,” Rylan calls out.

  “The hell it’s not,” Pomai responds. “You’re too late.”

  The wave has arrived. It rolls into them and they turn for the drop zone.

  Pomai is panting with exertion. She’s been under few waves this gigantic. But there is her father, pulling for the wave so hard his shoulders are striating through his skin. He’s beaten her, now she sees it. He’s made it to the deeper section before her and now it’s too late, the wave is forming, he’s in the proper place, already posturing up for the drop. The wave is his; she should leave off paddling and let him take his ride.