House of Many Gods

by Kiana Davenport

  She heard the soft rumble of a rolling pin on dough. The rich, solid sounds of plates being set on a table. The rattle of chopsticks, the clattering splash of spoons. Then the throaty waterfall of milk being poured from a pitcher. She smelled stew bubbling on the stove. A meal that would be full of starch, and good, good grease. She sighed, feeling safe, back in that small-kid time that kitchen sounds recaptured.

  IT WAS AFTER 2:00 A.M. WHEN SHE HEARD A DOOR SLAM. THROUGH her window, she saw a truck painted with skull and bones slowly pull away. Then, soft footsteps on the lānai.

  She moved to her doorway. “Makali‘i. It’s Aunty Ana …”

  She drew her into her room, and when she switched the light on, the girl flinched, her eyes not quite focusing.

  “Have you been smoking dope?” Ana asked.

  “Only one puff. Everybody smokes at school.”

  “You’re absolutely stoned! Maka, you’re still a minor. You can’t be doing this.”

  She backed up and sat on Ana’s bed, her face so lovely Ana’s heart broke. “Doing … what?”

  “Hanging out with ‘gang boys.’ At the huts.”

  With effort, Makali‘i focused her eyes. “I … never did.”

  Ana grabbed her arm, fighting to keep her voice down. “I know who owns that truck. He’s one of them.”

  “I … only went there once.”

  “Everything is once with you. Meanwhile, you’re breaking your mother’s heart.”

  The girl suddenly stood up. “She doesn’t care. I’m just another mouth to feed, another kid to yell at. Who ever notice when my grades were good? When I fought off boys to stay a virgin. Nobody! So I think, what for? May as well be like the rest of this … house of illegitimates.”

  Ana sat back stunned, as if the girl had slapped her. “Maka. Life is something very dear. I’m begging you, don’t throw yours away. Finish high school, you’ve only got two years. Then come and live with me in Honolulu.”

  Makali‘i’s voice grew small. “You promised that before. You never called.”

  “This time I swear to God I will. Just promise me you won’t go near the Quonsets anymore.”

  “Okay. I promise …”

  Ana made a promise to herself, as well. She would call the girl each week, come home more often. The next day Makali‘i seemed so easy and affectionate, Ana had an awful feeling that she did not remember her promise. That she did not remember their conversation at all.

  SHE FINISHED THAT YEAR NEAR THE TOP OF HER CLASS, PASSED the board exams, and was certified. Feeling she needed a rest before starting an OB-GYN specialty, Ana joined the staff of Queen’s Hospital as a general physician. On her thirty-first birthday she looked in a mirror, amazed. She had passed another postsurgery year, her test results negative.

  In a celebratory mood, she drove out to the house, and as she pulled into the driveway she saw a man take off across the field, riding a piebald with a quirky trot. A storm was due, the sky becoming lead. Huge drops fell, biting sudden webs into her windshield. She made a run for it and found Rosie on the porch swing, her lovely face aglow, as if she were sitting in brilliant sunlight. Seeing Ana, she dropped her head like a woman waiting for sentencing.

  Puzzled, Ana moved into the house. Ben dozed on the couch, where a gecko with a livid blue tongue lolled on his forehead. He woke up startled and brushed the gecko off.

  “Uncle Ben. What’s up?”

  His lips parted and hung there. He looked out toward the lānai. Ana turned to Tito in his wheelchair. He nervously shuffled a deck of cards while flipping through an old National Geographic. Rain poured in the windows, newspapers blew round the room. Cousins sat dead still, avoiding Ana’s eyes.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. “What’s wrong with you folks?”

  “Whooo, da rain.” Ben closed his eyes, inviting sleep.

  She slammed down windows, then checked on Noah, who sat behind his nicotine-yellowed curtains.

  “Uncle. What’s going on? Rain pouring in the house, folks sitting there like dolls …”

  He turned and smiled, showing teeth ambered from tobacco, the scorched satin of their sides. He pointed out the window. Wishbones of lightning were suddenly shot with sunlight, turning the day berserk. Rain thundered hard for several minutes, then began to slow until the valley was bathed in liquid sun, fat drops evaporating as they fell.

  He put his arm round her shoulder, his smile radiant.

  Rosie … hāpai! We going celebrate. With hulihuli chicken.”

  She started to ask who the father was. Then she saw the human head bouncing in and out of tall grasses. The man on the piebald with a quirky trot coming back across the fields. High in the saddle, he held his arms out to his sides, each hand gripping the legs of an upside-down chicken. Each chicken’s wings outstretched and beating, trying frantically to break free.

  As Ana watched, the horse leapt a narrow stream, momentarily airborne, so that the rider holding the outstretched wings appeared to be flying. That’s how Ana would remember it.

  “Tommy … Suzuki … Goldberg …”

  “Yeah!” Noah grinned. “Tommy Two-Gods.”

  Days later she and Rosie sat side by side on the porch swing.

  “You don’t hate me?” Rosie asked.

  Ana slid her arms around her. “Rosie. Tommy and I were kids. It was puppy love back then.”

  Rosie sighed with relief. “When he first came to visit we talked about you. He said what I told you, that you were always two steps ahead of him. You were meant for better things. He came again with flowers. Conversations so natural, everything as it should be. Oh, I fought my feelings! How I fought them. Two months we talked, and never touched. Then, Tommy said he loved me.”

  In her eyes, a resurrected glow. Rosie looked like a girl again, caught at that perfect moment of combustion when beauty and youth burn hardest.

  “Rosie. He’s the man you’ve been waiting for. Remember when I used to bring him home? Tommy always stared at you. You were the one he was in love with.”

  And, looking back, Ana realized that what she said was true.

  THREE WEEKS AFTER THEY MARRIED THEIR BABY WAS BORN, A DATE Ana would remember because, that night while the family celebrated, Makali‘i came home very late. She moved in slow motion, as if she were stoned, her eyes not quite focusing. Ignoring her instincts, Ana held her tongue. For the rest of her life she would feel that, had she spoken out, she could have saved Makali‘i.

  One night the sound of sirens screaming up and down the road. Cops had busted up a drug deal back in the valley and gave chase to one of the dealers whose truck was painted with skull and bones. During the pursuit, he took a curve too wide. The speeding truck crashed into a ravine and flipped over, crushing the girl beside him.

  Ana squeezed Rosie’s hand as the surgeon spoke softly, measuring each word for tact as he explained Makali‘i’s condition, her shattered skull, her chances of recovery. In the following weeks Rosie sat silent, tended by the family while Ana watched her child, a strapping boy named Koa Jacob Jesus. He would be a three-god child. As she held him, she watched cars drive slowly past, like in the old days, the ogling of unregenerate voyeurs.

  People pointed at the house where the “gang girl” lived, the one now rumored to be brain-dead. Ana imagined how they appeared to strangers: maimed and warped, a family of illegitimates. She suspected that Makali‘i would be their icon when they spoke of bad blood, the downward spiral of that family’s genes.

  The girl remained in a coma for weeks. Her body, hooked up to transparent tubes, appeared smaller yet somehow larger—an immense absence in her presence. Whatever part of her still alive was no longer in the room. In that time, Rosie sat on the porch swing like a statue in repose, eyes slung low, her mouth and lips weightless. Sometimes she sat out there all night. In humid mornings, steam rose from her shoulders, air rippled with her body heat like concentric afterimages of herself. Her odor so strong they smelled her pulse.

  No one in the fa
mily seemed able to speak. All they knew was pain. At night there was only the sound of cicadas like scorching heat rendered into sound. Even youngsters—little beauties dark and electric—moved on tiptoe, their expressions at the window sad. Lopaka’s face was so mythical and harsh, Ana moved close, wanting to press the tattooed teardrop near his eye as if it were a doorbell. Wanting to gain entry and share his pain.

  She tried to talk to Rosie, to draw her out. Finally, she just sat with her, rocking back and forth. Afraid she was losing her, that Rosie’s mind would go, Ana began to pray. She even stopped using profanities. She waited. What would happen waited with her.

  THE DAY WAS OVERCAST AND MOODY WHEN THE PHONE RANG. Lopaka answered it, then left the house. Hours later he returned, switched off the ignition of the car, and sat staring through the windshield. Then he slowly walked up to the screen door and asked Ana to come out to the yard. In the kitchen, she was suddenly aware of the smell of wet drainboards.

  She stepped out to the lānai, and moved down the steps. She searched Lopaka’s face as he placed his hand on her shoulder. Then she sank slowly to the ground, folding like a paper doll.

  Anticipating her question, in a confused reflex, he asked the question instead. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Is she?” Ana asked.

  “She is.”

  PART THREE

  HŌ‘IKE NA KA PU‘UWAI

  Revelations of the Heart

  MAKANI PĀHILI

  Hurricane

  FOR YEARS SHE WILL DREAM OF FLYING OVER MILES OF TREMBLING, turquoise skin. Of planes stacked upside down like smashed toys. Boats sprawled belly-up across wrecked piers. A body floating in a harbor. She will remember buckled tarmac, her plane skidding sideways, coming to a bouncing stop. Relief crews stretching bright blue tarp over miles of roofless houses.

  She will remember the crunch of shattered glass as they climbed through the rubble of hotels, searching for survivors. Winds moaning through thousands of caved-in rooms. The wrecked and ringing chandeliers. When flashlight batteries went dead, they searched by candlelight. And when generators failed in makeshift hospitals, they performed surgery by candlelight.

  Ever after, when she sees flickering candles, she will think, ‘Iniki. ‘Iniki brought him to her. He was not in her life. And then he was …

  THE HURRICANE HIT EVERY ISLAND—TAKING RESORTS, ENTIRE towns. It shaved the island of Kaua‘i to the bone—whole forests denuded and flattened, buildings crushed like pickup sticks. For days highways were knee deep in water and debris, undermining the efforts of relief workers. And everywhere surfaces glittered with shattered glass, giving devastation a diamond shimmer.

  Twenty-four hours after Hurricane ‘Iniki passed, across the blacked-out island homeless people huddled in armory shelters, or at campfires, or they walked the beaches, numb. Near the ruins of the Coco Palms Hotel, Ana sat at a campfire holding a child who had been pulled unharmed from a nearly flattened house.

  She rocked her back and forth, half crooning, “Shh, soon your mama and papa will come for you. Meanwhile, I will tell you a story.”

  The child stopped struggling as Ana stared at the campfire.

  “Now … shall I tell you of our island winds? Oh, there are so many they are worshipped as gods. Elders can name two hundred different kinds of winds. There is the Kona wind, warning of winter. It blows long and hard, brings gray, humid weather, torrents of rain! And there is Ha‘i Mo‘olelo, the ‘telling wind,’ that makes a haunting sound like bamboo nose flutes heard at night.”

  Ana spoke softly, watching the child’s eyelids flutter. She prayed her sleep would last until her parents were found, that they would be all right, that she would never know the terror of thinking they were dead. While she gazed at the child, a stranger approached and stood listening, just beyond the light of the campfire.

  “… As with our winds, there are hundreds of rains. Each one is a god, and has a god-name …”

  The child slept now, Ana felt her soft snores against her chest. She looked round the campfire at people needing comfort, and continued “talking-story.”

  “… Just now we have been in the ‘punishing rains and hurling winds,’ the time of Makani Pāhili, the hurricane. But now the hurricane is pau. We are in the gentle winds of healing.”

  She covered the child with a blanket, and long before dawn a priest brought her parents, who took her in their arms. Ana had talked for hours, and now sat back exhausted. And that is when the stranger stepped out of the dark, his sudden face a match-strike, like a painting revealed on the wall of a cave.

  He sat down at their fire and began to talk. He talked in mixed accents—the argot of a drifter—his words seeming to bob in the phlegmy workings of his lungs. At some point, almost shyly, he told them his name, then continued spinning tales, distracting them from the wreckage all around them.

  The storm had left polluted rivers, water shortages, and, in the daytime, killing heat. Yet this stranger was dressed head to toe in black leather so stiff it creaked. His teeth were big and crooked, his face pale, slightly sunburned. Under thick, dark hair, his eyebrows shot out in ecstatic skyward angles. She found his eyes uncanny—black, intense—the eyes of someone who could carve his life into another human’s skin. He handed out cigarettes and chain-smoked, the movement of his hand slow, almost tender, as he brought the cigarette to his lips. He seemed to anticipate each long inhale like someone who had known deprivation.

  Ana glanced round the dying campfire at faces sad and dark as angels, as folks listened, intrigued by this man’s stories. He saw they were exhausted, newly homeless, some even wounded. Maybe he saw them as childlike, needing comfort, to just sit still and listen. So he continued, his long-winded yarns slipping through the hours. And listening, they learned how war and hunger had invented him. How his past seemed to give him permission.

  He coughed, shared a warm beer, then talked again, rolling up his sleeves and pants. In growing light and heat, sweat cataracted down his neck, soaking through the leather shirt. Ana saw he was lean, of average height, snakes of muscles in his arms and legs. Yet, his hands were remarkably huge and scarred. As morning temperatures continued to rise, he slowly pulled off his leather boots, and then his socks. Even his feet were scarred.

  A big red ball of sun ascended, yet he continued telling tales as if he needed to talk himself empty. The sun began to hover, then hammered overhead, the fire slowly embered. National Guardsmen in fatigues passed with chain saws, dragging chopped-up utility poles. The stranger paused in his telling, his eyes darting to armed Marines scouting for looters across the road. They stood laughing at a couple with shotguns in their laps, dozing in front of their dry-goods store. A slapdash sign stood between them, NOTHING HERE WORTH DYING FOR!

  The storyteller yawned and someone asked him, “Tired, fellah? Where you from?”

  He fell silent as if there were a right and a wrong answer. Now folks slowly stood, preparing to meet the new day’s manifesto of tragedies. A thousand more people homeless. Another dozen missing. Another body found. Ana gathered her things and glanced his way as dusty leaves fluttered overhead, casting the stranger in dappled sunlight. In that moment a kind of beauty gathered round him, the beauty of bright sky reflected off black stubble on his chin. He would lose them now; she saw his panic. It was like seeing the whole curve of a man’s life pass through him.

  She kept her face neutral, hoping it looked kind, the particular kindness one extends to loners and the lost. He bent, helping someone fold a blanket. His shirt fell open; his bare chest looked skinny, almost adolescent. He helped stamp out the fire, then leaned forward offering his hand, telling her his name again.

  “Nikolai … Volenko.”

  A name that seemed to fit his stories.

  She shook his hand. “I’m Ana. Well, I’ve got to get back to the med team …”

  “You are doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “You live here on Kaua‘i?”

  She shook he
r head. “I’m one of the volunteer medics from Honolulu.”

  “So. What I can do to help you?”

  The island was already glutted with branches of the military, the National Guard, Red Cross. So many disaster-relief organizations, storm victims were complaining that these people were eating all their rations.

  “What did you come here to do?” she asked.

  “Normally, I make films … documentaries.”

  Ana looked up at half a dozen helicopters with camera lenses hanging from their bays. The media had swarmed in like locusts. She shook her head, picked up her backpack, and walked away.

  He ran alongside her. “Wait. I am not ghoul like them. I flew in before hurricane. Was trying to get footage on … something else.”

  “Like what? Our local drug trade? Our women’s prison?”

  He skipped in front of her, blocking her way, then stood so close tiny shafts of dust danced between them.

  “I am not sensationalist. My films are very relevant, very sympathetic.” Then he smiled. “You liked my stories?”

  She thought of the amazing things he had told them. “They weren’t stories one would like, or dislike. Were they true?”

  “Yes. And no. I watched you. You are very good listener.”

  She started to ask what he was doing on the island, but was afraid it would turn into conversation and she would not be able to get away.

  She stepped back, half joking, “You’ll die in this heat, in those clothes.”

  He slapped the leather pants and grinned. “Yes. They are killing me.” Then he looked around nervously. “So. You do not need help?”

  Ana shook her head. “But, thank you.”

  Reluctantly, he bent to gather a canvas bag and backpack. For some reason she stood there, watching him prepare to go.