by Rick Wilber
She stood too, eyes blazing. “Are you?” she asked.
“You don’t know anything about me,” he said.
“I know-”
“Oh, how do you know?” she shouted. “What do you know? You only think you know! And don’t tell me what to do or who I am! That’s all anyone ever has done!” She ran off across the lawn, and he knew she was crying.
He followed, grabbed her shoulder, whirled her around, and held her. “Don’t go, Kai,” he whispered. “Please don’t go. Please don’t be angry with me. I need you more than anything. I need this time. I need you.”
“Then help me,” she whispered, and then the rally was back, a long-haired man was ranting on the stage, and Cen had to leap onto the sidewalk to avoid being hit by a bus.
***
Cen was nursing a Green Maiden, beer number eighty-three on the international list of 284. He’d been through the list four times, and each time he finished, he thought that from now on he’d just pick the beers he’d liked. But then some compulsivity made him start again . . . number one . . . number two . . . . It started to rain, and he relaxed into the sound of the patter on the tin roof, the comforting, glowing neon. Everything was the same here, since when he was a kid and his mom sent him down here to drag Dad home. Even the bartender, Kyo, was the same, only now he was middle-aged.
“Does it ever stop raining around here?” The guy next to him asked Kyo.
Kyo snapped his white towel around a glass he’d fished from a tub of water. His face was burnished and mottled. Cen couldn’t ever remember seeing him smile.
“You think this is bad?” asked Kyo. “Back about twenty years ago, when we had so many workers to build that spaceport over Hickam side, we had a lotta women hanging out over here with nothing to do. Oh, sure, some of them worked on the port, but a lot were just here until that job was over, and there were plenty of delays. They call it the rock, here, and some of them got what we call rock fever. That rock fever’s been good to me - it sells a lot of booze. Anyway, it don’t stop raining here in Kailua half the year.”
Time had taken on that echoey quality for Cen. He knew what Kyo would say before he even said it: “It’d get so bad some of them women would pick up a gun and blow their heads off-”
Cen had broken the Green Maiden against the side of the mahogany bar before he knew it. He held the jagged nub poised over his head. “Shut up,” he yelled at Kyo. “SHUT UP!”
The bouncer smashed Cen’s head against the bar, slammed him down on the tatami mat, knelt on his back with a heavy knee. Cen retched and smelled sour vomit next to his face on the floor.
“Damn Hawaiians - they’re all the same,” the bouncer said.
He heard Kyo’s shuffle as he came around the bar, then stared at calloused old feet in weathered zoris.
“Let him up,” Kyo said.
“But-”
“Let him up, I said.”
Cen staggered to his feet and leaned back against the bar. “Sorry, Kee.”
“I am, too,” Kyo said. “I forgot. But I don’t want to see you in here for a while, got it? Keep your face out of my bar.”
***
Ten minutes later, Cen was hitchhiking up the Pali road. Not knowing where he was going, he caught a ride, rode awhile in silence, and then, without knowing why, suddenly told the guy to pull over.
He staggered from the car and found the trailhead just inside the trees at the side of the road. It was a narrow, unmarked trail, overgrown and faint. Yet he knew it was the right one. He wondered how he had forgotten for so long.
He knelt and dunked his head in the cold, rushing stream, and, when he lifted it, his mind was absolutely, painfully clear. Clearer than it had been in years. He had been ten, and his mother had walked in front of him, very quickly.
Cen stood and began hiking. As he walked, he remembered it all.
Rain swept in a great sheet across the windward side of Oahu and pattered suddenly on the leaves of the koa forest all around Cen, as he and his mother continued to climb. The gusting wind chilled him, and he hugged himself, keeping a close eye on the slippery rocks of the trail. The shower passed swiftly, leaving the air cold and smelling of damp earth.
“When will we be there, Mom?” he asked, panting.
She walked ahead of him, slim in her khaki thrift shop shorts. She had knotted her plaid cotton skirt beneath her breasts; her back, between shorts and shirt, was brown. Her long, straight black hair was loose, and moved with every gust of wind; a few wet strands stuck to her back. She seemed not to hear him.
“It’s getting late,” he said, more loudly. His legs ached, but she was starting to walk even faster. “Won’t Dad be worried?”
She stumbled, said, “Damn,” then resumed her stride. “No, sweet kukui, he won’t be worried.”
But Cen knew that she and his dad fought a lot, shouted at each other after he went to bed almost every night. After he’d had a few beers, sometimes Dad hit Mom. At least, Cen was pretty sure that he did. Where else did she get those bruises? Dad never painted like he used to, anymore, either - paintings he used to sell through small galleries in Honolulu. Not since some haole woman critic made fun of him, called him a “primitive Hawaiian” in the paper, and made people afraid to invest.
Cen had watched him light that newspaper on fire and toss it into the air, had been afraid when the wind wafted it skyward spread-armed, a ghost which whitened to fragile ash, then fragmented as it tipped the banana tree fronds.
“We don’t have to go,” he said. “I’m getting cold.” He didn’t know what she was up to.
She took a narrow trail that forked to the left. Cen snagged a ripe yellow guava as he walked, and rolled the sweet pink insides around in his mouth, munched the seeds. He picked a second. “Don’t eat too many of them, Century,” his mother said over her shoulder. She was the only one who ever called him by his whole name. “You’ll get sick.” How did she always know what he was doing?
They walked along the crumbling knife-edge of the peak for almost a mile, and Cen became terrified that he might slip, fall to the floor of the deep green valley, almost a mile below. Wisps of cloud floated halfway down the face of the near-vertical ridge which curved around ahead of them, cloaked in dense green rain forest.
He concentrated on his breathing, and on what he saw so far below, trying to calm himself.
The valley below the Nuuanu Pali was crowded. Subdivision roads etched minute black paths between squares of the plain white housing where Interspace workers lived; where he lived. A blue tile roof caught the sun next to Enchanted Lake, where rich Interspace execs lived. Not so scary. Beautiful. Interesting.
The path dipped, and they entered a clearing. They were only a hundred feet below the top of the ridge; Cen decided that rain alone kept a narrow waterfall splashing into the rocky pool before them. A blast of chilly air bent the ribbon of water for a moment; then it fell straight once more.
“They’re back here,” his mother said.
“What?” he asked, but his question was drowned by the hiss of water washing stone. Cen scrambled after her into a narrow, slippery indentation behind the waterfall. The scent of cool damp stone mingled with moist, earthy smells. He mimicked her handholds as she angled up, ten, twenty feet, terrified that he would smash into the shallow pool below.
Cen was bleeding from many small lava cuts when she reached a narrow ledge, sat back on her heels, and pushed aside a thin slab of stone about a foot high. She reached into the cavity with both hands and pulled hard; a long, narrow bundle emerged.
She set it between them. It was wrapped in crumbling tapa cloth, made from pounding roots until they were supple and flat. Her long brown fingers untied the gnarled vine which held it together, and unfolded the tapa with great care.
Cen’s breath stopped. “Bones?” he asked.
“Go ahead, touch them,” she said. “After me, you’ll be the last one to know where they are.”
He stared, uneasy. “Are they human�
��?”
“Kamehameha’s bones,” she said.
Cen touched them. They were rough and yellow. He felt kind of empty and dizzy. It was weird to think that these old bones were once wrapped in flesh and blood, like his.
“Why do you have them?” he asked. He knew, of course, from the genealogy chant, that he was descended from Kamehameha on his mother’s side. Sometimes, when his father was yelling at his mother, Cen heard him shout “princess” at her, and then laugh, as if it were a joke.
“Your grandfather was a kahuna, a priest,” his mother said. “At least one person has known the secret all these years. These bones have much mana, much power. At least, that’s what they thought at the time.” She smiled slightly and glanced at him. “They still do,” she said. “Someone must know. Later.”
She was quiet as she enfolded the bones within the tapa, a bundle more than half as tall as she was. The man must have been a giant. His bones clunked together in a hollow way. Cen saw that she tried not to make any new creases in the tapa, because every time she did, the cloth, which was like fine brown paper covered with tiny, precise geometric designs, would break.
She wrapped the old vine around it again and tied it, shoved the bundle into the long, dark hole, slid the tall stone back in front of it, and piled several smaller rocks against that. A bank of ferns drooped over the place, bright green in the gloom of the rain forest.
“That’s all,” she said.
It was a long walk back to the trailhead where they’d left the car, but she was just as quiet as ever. He asked, “What do you want me to do with them, why did you show them to me?” a couple of times.
She just said, “It’s a sacred duty,” that was all, and didn’t speak again.
His dad was in the tiny kitchen when Cen pushed open the screen door, rattling jars in the refrigerator and muttering. He pulled out a beer. The picture of Queen Liliuokalani, some regal-looking old Hawaiian that his mom kept on the wall, jumped when the old man slammed the refrigerator door.
“Hi,” said Cen, and smiled. Sometimes it worked. Today it didn’t.
“Don’t ‘hi’ me,” the old man snarled. “I want to know where my dinner is. Where the hell have the two of you been?”
“We went for a walk,” said his mother, right behind him. “Don’t worry, it just has to heat up.” She pushed back her hair, started up the microwave, and took some plates from the cupboard.
“A walk, my ass,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb. “You’ve got a pretty soft deal here. All you’ve got to do is cook and clean, and spread your legs once in a while. Once a month, if I’m lucky, if you feel like it. While I’m out fixing those fucking robots every day!” His dad upended the beer and swallowed half the bottle.
Cen wondered if he should go to his room or just leave the house.
“I used to work,” his mother said, so quietly that Cen could barely hear her, “before Interspace brought in the Japanese teachers for the Japanese, the Korean teachers for the Koreans, the Czech teachers for the Czechs. You always forget that you didn’t have to have a job for years. And you don’t seem to remember that I sent you to tech school too, and pushed you to get that job. Otherwise all you’d do is surf and paint and live off my teaching money. Ha! Do I have the only clear memory around here?” She turned to him, her hands bristling with chopsticks. Her chin lifted. Her eyes were very black.
“It must be great to be so good and so very smart, too,” his father snapped back. Cen’s stomach felt funny. It always started this way. Maybe if he just acted normal, got some juice out, tried to joke around, they’d stop. He went to the cupboard and got out a glass. But he couldn’t think of anything funny to say. His mind always seemed to get stuck when they fought.
Cen jumped as his father slammed a cupboard door his mother had left open. “I guess that’s what you think I did, anyway. Maybe it’s good you don’t have a job. You spent all the money you made sending this lazy kid to a fancy school.” His dad’s voice was rising. “I don’t see what difference it made. He’s pretty dumb, if you ask me. Nothing special about him. He’s a little hoodlum. Have you seen that crowd he hangs out with? Smoking pakalolo already!”
“I wonder where he gets that from?” she asked, setting a dish on the table with odd care. The chill in her voice made Cen feel very bad. He couldn’t deny the pakalolo. He took a cold bottle of juice out and started to pour it into the cup he’d set on the counter. “And why do you teach him all that stupid Hawaiian stuff anyway, all those superstitions,” his dad continued, in his low, grating voice. “No matter who he is, they’re useless. Why don’t you face it? He’s a bad kid.”
A vision of Kamehameha’s bones flashed in front of Cen’s eyes. “Those old superstitions.” Dad would really be mad if he knew what had made his dinner late. Nervous, he turned too quickly, bumped his elbow against the counter, and tried to grab the slippery bottle of juice. It smashed on the floor. “You stupid bastard!”
Cen bolted out the door into the rain, ducking under the upraised arm of his father. He cried as he ran down the road to the beach, zoris wet and slick and slapping his feet, fists clenched. He was only ten, but tall for his age, and his father was just a little shrimp, living on Primo Beer, dark sweaty quarts of it every day after work, then picking these fights. When he got to the beach park, he was glad that the rain had kept everyone else away. He dove beneath warm small waves and surfaced further out, lay on his back and kicked hard, staring at the black hole in the mountain across the bay that was going to be the maglaunch.
He rocked on the gentle swells, and rain pecked at his face. Saltwater leaked into his mouth, tasting like tears. It was after dark when he started to walk back home, and he shivered in his wet clothes. Dad would be passed out by now, and Mom would be sitting in the kitchen reading. But as he got closer to the house, he heard more shouting. Shit.
The grass he walked across was rough and wet. Cen climbed up on the cinderblock under the kitchen window and peered in through a crack in the blinds. His mother was standing next to the door to the living room, beside the kitchen table. The glass top was littered with the remnants of dinner - chunks of rice, a bottle of soy sauce, a few scattered shreds of bok choy and bean sprouts. The exhaust fan pushed air out next to him and it smelled like garlic and beer.
“I’ve been working all these years!” His father’s voice was low and mean. His mother laughed bitterly, but his dad overrode it. “That’s right. Paying for the little bastard and for you.”
“Don’t call him a bastard. He’s yours, and he’s alii.”
“That old crap. Wake up! That means nothing now. Nothing. Less than nothing! I thought so, and I was wrong. You think it makes a difference that you’re a princess? You’re dumb as a post! Why do you fill him with all those superstitions?”
She laughed gently, but something in her laugh made Cen shiver even more. Or maybe it was the desperate look in her eyes, which he could see even from across the room.
“It does mean something,” she said. “It means everything!” Her face looked different in the fluorescent light. She looked older, more regal, her long black hair flowing around her fierce face - the face of a warrior, he thought. The face of someone he didn’t even know. Her hand on the table was shaking.
“You’re crazy,” said his father. “You’ve ruined my life with this Hawaiian crap!”
“You believed in it once,” she said. ‘When we were young - remember? We believed together. Until you started drinking-”
“Yeah, sure, it’s always my fault, isn’t it?” Cen couldn’t see his father’s face, but he knew the sneer - the curled lip, the terrifying, cold eyes. “I’m sick of you hounding me!” He shoved his wife in the chest with the flat of his hand; slapped her face so hard that the sound rang out in the still night, slapped her again, and again.
Call the police, said the voice in Cen’s head, but he couldn’t breathe. He tried to shout, but his throat squeezed it to a low, hoarse sob.
“Stop i
t!” she said, her voice ragged. “Stop, I’m warning you. I’ve had enough!”
Instead, he took another menacing step toward her.
She stared at him, her face twisted, tears running down it, and fumbled in the pocket of her smock. Hand shaking, she pulled out the dull black gun they kept in a dresser drawer.
“No!” screamed Cen. He jumped down and tore around to the front of the house. He tried to yell for help as he ran, hoping their Russian neighbors would hear, and that they would understand, but his voice sounded far away, like somebody else’s.
He slammed through the screen door and rushed over to his struggling parents, leapt onto his father’s back, screaming and pounding with his fists, then shifted and reached for the gun. He managed to get his hand on one of theirs, he didn’t know whose, and started shaking it hard, trying to loosen its grasp on the gun. His arm was twisted, then felt as if it had been wrenched off as the gun exploded. His father roared, turned, and with one arm sent him flying across the room. Cen’s head hit the edge of the table and he lost consciousness.
When he opened his eyes, his head hurt like hell and his entire body ached. Especially his arm. He reached up and felt where it hurt: sticky. He jerked upright. His mother was crumpled onto the floor. A halo of blood was splattered onto the wall around her head. He sat up and vomited onto the floor until his heaves brought up nothing, then leaned back against the cupboard, exhausted, not looking at his mother but at a pattern on the floor tile: white, crisscrossed by pink lines which formed diamonds. Blood had puddled in one of them, and his eyes began to follow the narrow, twisty convolution of red which led into it.
Then he hunched forward and hugged his knees. He wondered why he felt so calm, and where his father was. Maybe he thought that Cen was dead too. Maybe he’d come back to make sure. He should run. Now. But he didn’t seem able to get up, not just yet. A slight, slow trembling moved through him, peaked, and subsided, as if he had caught a sudden chill.