One day she looked up from her books in shock. Younger cousins seemed taller. Spring had come and gone and it was autumn, the wet season. Ana felt she had given life the slip, that she was moving through it like a shadow. She worked summer jobs but would not remember them. She forgot the name of her favorite boar-hound, the one with almost human eyes.
Rosie waved checks at her from San Francisco. “Silly girl. With this money you wouldn’t have to work your way. You could live in the dorm, not have to commute.”
Ana stared at her, pupils enlarged to an anthracite gleam.
Some mornings she left the house so early it was dark, stars still hard and bright, the moon dropping blue notes on her shoulders. Wearing her rubber thongs, she grabbed her heavy book bag and her lunch and set off down the road, carrying her good shoes in a plastic bag. At night, walking home from the bus stop, she found her rubber slippers where she left them in the weeds, removed her good shoes and put them in the plastic bag. Then she started the steep climb up Keola Road. In malo‘o season, when red Wai‘anae dust blanketed the valley, she wore a kerchief across her face like a bandit. Neighbors watering their yards stepped out to the road and hosed it down so Ana could breathe on her long walk home.
Some nights, halfway up the road, she sat down, so mentally and physically exhausted, her eyes ached, moonlight on her head like a concussion. She looked up the badly lit road, saw the outlines of houses impossibly distant, and imagined her form trudging upwards like a crone. She imagined her tired face in conversation over supper, her half-conscious body laying itself down. She saw all this in a dream.
Later she woke, still curled up in the weeds beside the road, and heard them calling her name. They bent over her, Noah and Ben, faces like dark angels leaning out of paintings. They gently scolded her, lifted and half carried her, while youngsters dragged along her books and shoes. She smelled their perspiration, their clean uncle-smell and she was all right then. She knew where she was in the world.
“… waiting fo’ you, worried half to death …”
Barking dogs fell silent as they passed. So did two men fistfighting in their underwear. The silhouette of a woman in a doorway. Then, their house ablaze with lights. Rosie washing Ana’s face, her hands, her feet. A clean, fragrant sheet beneath her, and one billowing out over her. And then, the ecstasy of letting go.
By the end of her first year at university, she had refined her life almost to a point. Her studies, sleep, and food. A life of such unrelenting focus, it was like the workings of a clock. Ana looked down at textbook illustrations, the machinations of the human anatomy. Respiration. Digestion. Reproduction. Where was the illustration for the need to laugh, to touch and be touched? How did one illustrate longing, or loneliness? She dreamed of Tommy Two-Gods and woke up missing him, wondering where life had taken him. She slept curved inward, like a child.
PERHAPS BECAUSE SHE WAS READY, ONE DAY IN HER SOPHOMORE year a young man wandered out of the rain and into her life. He was drenched but his hair was perfectly intact, so sleekly gelled it looked bulletproof. His wet skin glowed like chrome. His name was Pak Morelli. Mother Korean, father Italian American.
“Is that hard for you?” she asked.
He laughed. “You know anyone that’s pure-blood? I grew up on kim-chee and lasagna.”
They spent their first nights fused together in the backseat of his car, making love with such abandon the car shimmied and bounced on its springs. Passing street dogs paused, listening to their cries. Then, a friend loaned him an apartment where they began meeting between classes twice a week.
On late bus rides back to Nanakuli, Ana crossed one leg over the other, still smelling their yeasty coupling. She felt a different kind of exhaustion then, her body fulfilled, aglow. Most days they didn’t talk much; what they physically gave each other seemed enough. Yet she was struck by his scrupulous lack of curiosity about her life, her aspirations. They saw each other several months before he broke it off.
“This girl found out about you … she’s Chinese.”
Ana shook her head confused. “And?”
“She says it’s you or her.”
“Why? Because I’m ‘country,’ from Nanakuli?” She sat up slowly. “Or because I’m kanaka?”
His hesitation set up a keen attentiveness in her.
“… Both. I guess.”
She rose from the bed and dressed, keeping her tongue still in her head, swallowing back profanities. Sighing, he half stood, pulling on his shirt and pants.
“No. Take off your clothes.” Her voice was suddenly different. It wasn’t kidding.
Puzzled, he stripped down to his underwear and sat on the bed. “Lie down. Turn your face to the wall.”
He thought she wanted to lie behind him, and hold him. Maybe beg him.
He lay down, facing the wall. “Ana, I’m really sorry that …”
“Shut up. Don’t turn around until I’m gone. And don’t ever look at me again. Not on campus. Not anywhere.”
She picked up his shoes and shirt and pants, flung them from the eighth-floor window, and walked out the door.
This breakup hurt more than losing Tommy Two-Gods. It was a hurt that went deeper than her pride, striking her psyche and her very soul. The family saw her pain and tried to distract her, make her a girl again, their Nanakuli girl.
Noah sat her beside him at his window, the nights so humid termites drowned in the creases of his neck.
“Horse races,” he whispered, pointing at the sky.
And she saw how the clouds did look like horses, huge, winged piebalds racing up the stars. They sat looking up for hours. He taught her how to smoke, to purse her lips and form smoke rings which, as they lazily expanded, field bats flew in and out of. Ben taught her how to torch-fish, how to play the ‘uli‘uli, and how to open a bottle of Primo with her teeth.
Some nights she and her older cousin, Lopaka, sat silent in his truck. He had come home from Vietnam a bitter man, his right leg shattered by shrapnel. For several years, he was a dropout, ignoring Ana, drugging and drinking with older gangs who hung out in the Quonsets at the end of Keola Road. Then he grew bored, tired of rehashing combat every night. He took stock of his life and went into rehab, and learned to walk again with a leg brace.
Then he had shocked the family by entering university on the GI Bill. Now he was preparing for law school, but he was still a loner, angry and bitter. The war and constant pain had bent him down, leaving his big, muscled shoulders weighted with that burden. He talked mostly with other vets and now and then with Ana, but cautiously.
Until he left for Vietnam, he had been the center of her life, and while he was gone, she remembered everything he taught her. In those years she had stood in fields flying her kites, watching their shoulders rub against the sky. And she had prayed, “Bring him home. Bring him home.” Until one day he was carried off a plane with wounded vets.
Now she was a full-grown woman sitting in Lopaka’s truck. He had become bookish, his Pidgin less pronounced. He spoke “proper” English now, but carefully, like someone new to it.
“So this guy put you down for being Wai‘anae?”
“And for being … kanaka.”
He shook his head. “These people … they don’t see that Hawaiians are slowly rising … One day when they’re finally ready to treat us with ‘fairness’ … they might find we are prepared for violence.”
She reacted slowly, because he had spoken slowly, in the old slow tribal rhythms.
“We’re not a violent people,” she said.
“No one is … till violence is done to them.”
He shaved every day now, and kept his nails and toenails clean, so parts of him looked new. But his face was the same, still so rugged and kanaka handsome, she found it hard to look him in the eye. Instead, while they talked, she looked at his muscular brown arms, the blue veins bulging and forking. She looked at his hair, so thick and curly she wanted to put her hand there. Wanted to tell him that he was still her her
o, that she would always love him, that life would be okay.
SHE AND ROSIE SAT UNDER A SICKLE MOON, CONTEMPLATING MEN.
“Not worth the trouble,” Rosie said. “All little boys. Handsome, rich, ugly, poor … still the same, all looking for their mamas.”
Ana laughed. “Then how’s come you can’t get enough of them?”
Rosie was in love again. Her third, or fourth, or seventh lover. This one wanted marriage.
“What for?” she asked. “I belong here, with ‘ohana. A husband would take me away, make me his slave. Or else live here, and put his two cents worth in.”
She nodded toward their elders, dozing in the shadows. “How could I leave them? They saved me from my mother.”
“I think of that, too,” Ana said. “This old place is falling down. The termites own it, really. But, how could I ever leave? Maybe when I’m older, when they’re gone. I’ll be nursing in the city then. You can come and live with me.”
Rosie studied her. “Nursing? He lalau! Nonsense! You want to count syringes the rest of your life? You’re going to medical school, and you know it.”
“I don’t know that. I’m not sure I have …”
“Ey! You remember that night you promised on my belly? On my baby’s head. You had a dream, to be a doctor. You promised you would try. You break that promise, you will kill me.”
She talked softly now. “Rosie. You’ve seen me these past two years. I’ve never worked so hard. I don’t remember anything but textbooks. Formulas. Equations. Med school means another four—five years. Twice as hard. Can you imagine? Even if I got accepted, I’d need to take out a loan. Then internship, residency. My God. I’d be twenty-seven, twenty-eight before I earn a decent income.”
“And so? And so? We talked about it nights when you were climbing up the road. You, and Lopaka. You’re first-generation college in this house. First-generation anything. You are our dreams. Lopaka’s going to be a lawyer even though he started late. All our savings go for you and him. What else are savings for? All you got to do is try. Then you kōkua kids coming up behind you. That’s ‘ohana. What life is for.”
She hesitated, not used to doing things that weren’t her idea. “Rosie, do you know how many students drop out of med school every year? Suppose I try, and fail?”
“Ana. You never try, you never know.”
“I’m tired. I’m not that smart! I thought I was, I’m not. I have to cram and pray for every grade.”
Rosie stood now, hands on hips. She looked out at the night, then turned and looked at Ana.
“Let me tell you something, girlie. You can do anything you set your mind to. You don’t want to hear this but … you’re just like your mama. Nerves of steel when you make up your mind. I don’t care if it takes ten, twenty years. Just say you want to be a doctor. That you’ll try.”
She cried then. “I want it more than anything. I want to make you proud.”
“I will be proud,” Rosie said. “You will be a healer.”
ONE DAY AFTER CLASSES SHE FOUND THE FAMILY GATHERED IN front of the TV. There had been an accident on the U.S. mainland.
“Place called Three Mile Island, state of Pennsylvania,” Rosie said. “One of those reactor things broke down. Oh, look … people vomiting.” She held Makali‘i in her lap, while younger children gathered round, asking if they were all going to die.
“Shhh,” Ben cried. “Saying thousands of folks breathed in dat stuff. Even in dere water now. Ho! Look dem cows, lying down. Say radio-iodine already in dere milk. Look dat field, hundreds dead birds. All da flowers black.”
The newscaster quoted experts as saying that half the residents of central Pennsylvania were affected by the Three Mile Island meltdown. “America’s worst nuclear disaster.”
Ben quickly turned off the TV. Then one of the old aunties spoke.
“A‘ole pilikia! No worries. We’re thousands of miles from that state Pennsylvania.”
Lopaka slowly turned to her. “You think we’re safe? The U.S. military is our biggest industry.”
“So? That makes our islands safer.”
“No. It makes us potential victims. Right now we’ve got two dozen nuclear subs homeported here in Pearl Harbor. You think they don’t have accidents on those ships? Millions of gallons of radioactive waste from those subs have already been dumped into the harbor.”
“Lopaka, hush,” Rosie said. “Wait till I get these youngsters off to bed.”
She herded the children from the room, then returned and sat facing him. “Now. How do you know all this stuff?”
“My professors. Most of them are liberals. Environmentalists.”
He glanced round the room, his handsome dark face flushed. “You folks have any idea what’s going on? You know what’s just down the road at Lualualei Naval Reservation? They got chemical and biological weapons stashed in underground arsenals. Why do you think that whole valley is restricted? It’s also a nuclear-weapons depot. Armed soldiers patrolling day and night.”
Ana shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”
“You ever try driving into the valley at Lualualei? You want to see? Come on.”
She followed him out to his truck, then Rosie followed, squeezing Ana in between them. He drove up the coastal highway to the town of Lualualei, then turned right onto a road that took them deep into the valley, toward what was known as Lualualei Naval Reservation, a high-security military base no local had ever been inside of. Along the road the signs began. TURN BACK. RESTRICTED AREA.
Rosie glanced at him, alarmed. “You been out here before?”
“Plenty times. Now watch what happens.”
He suddenly swerved off the road into deep grass and drove along a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, until he saw a truck-sized hole. He drove through the hole and they entered deep woods, dense groves of trees. Through the trees they saw another high-security perimeter fence topped with barbed wire.
“They got them set in deeper and deeper, like Russian dolls.”
He swerved through the trees and drove along the inner fence until it suddenly became a double chain link, topped by blinding high-intensity lights. Every few yards was an electronic surveillance detection system. Then more signs. RESTRICTED AREA. USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.
“Turn around,” Rosie said.
“Not yet.”
In the distance, they saw what looked like armed guards in watch-towers.
“Now tell me, you think they’d have security like this if it was just a boot camp?”
Without warning, Lopaka bounced onto a paved road intersecting the groves of trees. Dead ahead to the right was a gate with posted sentries. Before they ever reached it, they were surrounded by three jeeps, half a dozen soldiers pointing rifles.
He skidded to a stop and stuck his head out the window at two approaching soldiers. “Sorry. We took a wrong turn.”
One of the soldiers moved close, squinting like a marksman.
“Yeah. Through a high-security fence! You people like fucking with us, don’t you? You know this area’s KAPU. Now, turn your kānaka butts around before we blow your tires.”
“You blow our tires, how you going get rid of us?”
The soldier flung the door of the truck open and grabbed Lopaka by the arm. “Okay, wise guy. Out. Out of the truck!”
Four others dismounted from their jeeps and gathered with their rifles aimed. They looked wired, ready to explode.
He was wearing baggy shorts, and now he swung out with his braced and damaged leg. “So, what you going do? Shoot me in my good leg?”
Rosie slid out of the truck, yelling her head off. “Shame! Shame on you, pointing rifles at us! You know how this boy got crippled? Vietnam. He came home with four medals for bravery and scar tissue for a leg. Fighting for America. For you! You like shoot us? Go ahead. Shoot us all!”
The soldier who had pulled Lopaka from the truck lowered his rifle. “Get back in the truck. Get outta here.”
Lopaka to
ok one step closer, and spoke softly. “These lands are our lands. You stole them from us. You’re storing nuclear weapons here. You’re testing bombs up the highway at Mākua. You think we’re stupid? We don’t know? … You think this is what I fought for? To watch my homelands blown to bits?”
The soldier looked down. He looked at his buddies. “Please. Get in the truck. Go home.”
As they backed up and pulled away, Lopaka shouted out the window, “Hope you guys are wearing dosimeters! This whole base is leaking radiation.”
On the drive back, they were silent, still in shock.
Ana finally turned to him. “You’ve known about this all along, haven’t you?”
“Be blind not to.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Frankly, that’s not what really bugs me. It’s the day-to-day stuff. Radioactive water from the harbors and rivers seeping into our soil. The stuff we stand in, in our fields. Stuff that seeps into the grass our dairy cows and pigs eat. And I’m bugged by those big naval radio towers out on Pa‘akea Road up the highway toward Ma‘ili. Those things emit electromagnetic radiation. The Navy has even admitted their hazard zone is two and a half miles in radius. That means all those farmers and kids could be contaminated …”
His voice trailed off, exhausted.
“I hear things on campus, too,” Ana said. “They’ve installed high-frequency radar-tracking stations on each of our islands. Those things leak that same electromagnetic stuff. They say it causes Alzheimer’s. Blindness. Mental retardation. Our trade winds blow that filth back and forth. We breathe it, it builds up inside us. One day we’ll end up like those Three Mile Islanders.”
Lopaka pulled up to the house and they fell silent, seeing the fields hung in moonlight. Then clouds suddenly enveloped the moon as if a hand had brushed a light switch.
Rosie stepped out of the truck. “I’m sick at heart. Don’t discuss this stuff in front of the elders, or the kids. Good night.”
Ana felt the heat of his arm touching hers. She didn’t even have to look at him. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew all this?”
House of Many Gods Page 9