Fierce as the Wind

by Tara Wilson Redd

  “Look, this place makes historically accurate reconstructed rum cocktails from the eighteen hundreds.” One of the guys points to something in his travel guide. He has stupid swoopy hair, tortoiseshell glasses, a J. Crew oxford unbuttoned to halfway down his chest.

  “Is it organic?” asks his girlfriend.

  He’s talking about X’s favorite restaurant, which we save up for and go to on his birthday. I keep my mouth shut. Why does it make me so mad that these mainland idiots are going there? Why does it make me so furious that they like a place I like? Because they’re getting it out of a book? Because if I were in their backyard, there’s no way I could waltz into their favorite places, and yet somehow the world bends around these people here in my home?

  In my fury, my tray tips and I drop a glass. It shatters, and all the boys in the back burst into applause. I laugh, take a bow, then take a breath. I look around and I’m here, in my favorite place where I belong, and these Lonely Planet wanderers will come and go forever and we’ll laugh at them like we always do. We may be part of the scenery in their world, but they’re also scenery in ours.

  I think about that as I clean up the glass: it’s like looking out a window. They’re on one side of the window, I’m on the other. Like Van Gogh’s window in his asylum. He painted a bunch of different views of the same wheat field he saw out that window, and so there are all these amazing paintings of the same place that he saw changing with the seasons. I think of working here like that. I see the same things, but they’re different every time.

  Except the thing is, Van Gogh’s window wasn’t exactly how he painted it. In reality, it had bars.

  And sometimes, through my window, I don’t see the wheat field. I see bars made of not enough money, of being the wrong color, of being worthless, of being someone you can throw away. I see bars made of Will I ruin my life if I go to art school? and I look different than everyone else in this college application brochure and I don’t know the rules here and everyone is staring. And for a little while, with Scumbucket’s hand in mine, I felt like maybe the bars were only things I’d imagined, and no one saw them but me. But now I think Scumbucket saw them, so he never took me seriously. We were holding hands, but I was on the other side of the bars.

  Shoot. I hadn’t thought about him for hours.

  By the time I’m done cleaning up the glass, the couples are gone, and I can’t even remember what I was so furious about. That’s what I tell myself. But everywhere I look, I see the bars.

  * * *

  When I get off my shift, it’s finally stopped raining. I catch a ride most of the way home on a delivery and walk the rest of the way. By the time I make it home, my friends are already hanging out in lawn chairs with sleeping bags set out all around on top of blue crinkly tarps. I’m the last to arrive, late for my own party. My neighbors are telling old war stories as Mr. Oshiro sets up the live stream. Mr. Oshiro’s conspiracy-monitoring setup is also wonderful for stealing things off the internet and playing them on one of his projectors on a sheet in the yard.

  “You girls need popcorn?” Mr. Kalani asks.

  “Or drinks?” asks Mr. Bu.

  “The audio is all wrong. Let me fix it for you,” says Mr. Oshiro.

  “Uncles, please,” I say, shooing them away as I drop my sleeping bag next to X. They retreat to my house, where Dad is barbecuing for all of us. They want to be included, I know, and I don’t mind. But the race is about to start.

  I look at the screen. Halfway across the world, there’s about to be an Ironman. It’s the first one I’ll have ever watched.

  I know abstractly what we’re looking for: the women’s pro race. But it’s not like normal sports, where the people parade out to clips of terrible songs. I don’t see anything but chaos. It’s so many people you can’t even figure out what’s going on.

  Then I get it. It’s the fifteen-ish women right at the front, waiting to swim. They wear swim caps and wet suits. They’re the ones competing for thousands of dollars. Maybe a thousand. Not sure.

  “I can’t watch twelve hours of people standing around,” X says. “That’s worse than baseball.”

  “You have not experienced hell until your dad makes you watch cricket,” Lani says. “But this is getting close.”

  “We don’t have to watch every second,” I say. “I just want to see them start. We’ll leave it playing and when we wake up, someone will have won.”

  “Too bad training by osmosis isn’t a thing,” Wyatt says.

  “I still don’t get it,” Trinity pipes up. “When do they run? Where are all the bikes?”

  Rei sighs very dramatically. She has been reading a book called The Triathlete’s Training Bible, which is so massive that she had to switch her purse from her favorite Kate Spade crossbody to a Fjallraven Kanken backpack. She closes the book and stops the calculations she’s doing on her phone.

  “Okay, so it’s #swimbikerun, right? So first you swim, then you hustle up after the swim, take the bike off the bar thing, and your shoes are on the bike—”

  “It’s all about the time,” Wyatt bursts in. “When you change from swimming to biking, that’s T1. Transition One. When you get off the bike and change for the run, that’s T2. The time you spend changing shoes and clothes is on the clock. That’s why they wear that one-piece outfit: so they don’t have to change clothes between skills.”

  Trinity thinks hard. At last, she asks: “How do they, like, go?”

  “I think it’s called a rolling start, for swim safety, so no one dies,” Rei says.

  “Everyone who dies doing an Ironman dies on the swim leg,” Wyatt confirms.

  “Wait, die?” I ask. “Like, ‘cease to exist’ die?”

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “Statistically, only middle-aged men die. You’ll be fine.”

  Trin sighs, exasperated. “No, guys, I mean go. Like…you know. Go.”

  We all look at her.

  “Are you trying to ask how they pee?” I ask her.

  We are silent.

  Seventeen hours? You’d have to.

  Rei is googling on her phone. “If you want to win, you pee in your wet suit and on the bike,” she says. “Surprisingly common question.”

  “Ew,” Lani says.

  “Well, you’re already wet from swimming and sweat,” Wyatt says.

  Lani grimaces. “That’s so gross.”

  “You can use a porta-potty, but it slows you down,” Rei says.

  “Miho’s in it to win it,” Trinity says. “Sacrifices must be made.”

  “We don’t have the money for the entry fee, so it’s irrelevant,” I say. “And how exactly do you pee in a space suit, Trin?” Everyone goes through an astronaut phase, but Trinity’s not like other people. She’s really going to be one.

  “I’m thinking the moon is worth wetting yourself, and a triathlon is not.”

  “Maybe Ironman is my moon,” I say. She thinks about that and turns back to the screen. I look too. The pros are swinging their arms, shaking out their legs, rolling their necks. I try to imagine myself there: my toes gripping the edge of the dock on the lake, the flying leap off, then the silence underwater for one moment until I break the surface again. I imagine the green-gray of lake water, nothing like the clear oceans here.

  A gun sounds. Fifteen women dive and disappear into the lake. And I dive with them, in my mind.

  It almost seems like something that could really happen. Almost.

  * * *

  My friends fall asleep in the yard before the first pro is even out of the water. I get it. It’s late. I watch the camera pan over the lake, the age-group athletes churning the water white, the pros leading the pack. Over the past week I’ve watched every triathlon video I can find, from the triumphant finish-line clips, to training videos, to the famous moment when Julie Moss fell, then literally crawled her way
to second place. I’ve gone back years through the social media of local tri clubs to see where they swim, what they wear, where they run.

  I’ve never watched sports, but I can’t turn away from the screen. These people half a planet away are doing this race right now, right this second, and watching it feels almost like doing it myself. The pro women are so fast. An hour to swim 2.4 miles. Five hours to bike 112 miles. A 3:30 marathon. That’s 140.6 miles in under ten hours. Some of them can get under nine, though a lot depends on the course and the conditions. I stay up and follow along as complete strangers climb out of a lake and transform, one by one, into cyclists. In a few hours they’ll all be runners.

  Except, no matter how they change, none of them will be like me. You can tell just by looking at them, all hard edges and muscles in skintight Lycra. Maybe I could keep up the pace, but I’d wear the wrong shirt or something and then everyone would know. It’s like when you go into a nice store, and you look around, and you realize you’re the one dark face in a sea of white. No one points it out, but you clearly don’t belong.

  Everyone looks the same in a wet suit and swim cap, I remind myself. The fact that every person on that screen is skinny and white doesn’t mean anything for me.

  I head toward the house to pick over leftovers on the grill. Dad is awake, reading next to the warm coals.

  “Hungry?” Dad asks. I nod, taking some chicken and sitting on the grass where I can still see the race. He squeaks over to me, then sits down with an “oomph” and kneads his half leg. I keep telling him to wear the nice prosthetic, but he’s stupid stubborn. Dad lost his leg when he swerved his car into oncoming traffic back in California. He’s lucky he’s the only one who was hurt. I think he doesn’t take care of himself because deep in his subconscious he thinks he deserved to lose his leg. Or maybe he’s just lazy, and old, and a dad. Probably all of the above.

  “They still swimming?” Dad asks.

  “They’re getting onto bikes now.”

  “Yes. Those bikes. Those very expensive bikes.”

  “I mean, mine will be fine with a few modifications,” I say. He shakes his head, takes a piece of chicken right off my plate.

  “Manners!” I say. He puts his pinkie out as he puts it in his mouth. I roll my eyes.

  “Miho, I have looked into this race. I do not think you are considering the total cost.”

  “It’s a little expensive,” I say.

  “Yes, it’s over a thousand dollars to participate. A thousand, Miho, my flower. And that’s just to get in. That doesn’t cover where you would stay, or how you would get there, or even all the things you would need to do it.”

  “That’s bananapants! Can I—”

  “No.”

  “But you don’t even know—”

  “You’re not getting a thousand dollars.”

  “But I need it.”

  “You don’t need it. You want it.”

  “No, Dad, I need it. I need it like the wind needs the trees.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I need to have something to ruffle. Otherwise I’m just air, Dad, raging against nothing. Without the trees, who would know the wind is blowing high above?”

  “Anyone with the Weather Channel.”

  “Dad.”

  He rolls his eyes.

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “No. Miho, you know better.”

  I bite my lip. Of course I know. And I know my dad is on disability, but that he works under the table doing odd jobs to make ends meet, and that he’s already killing himself so that I can have things like a phone and birthday parties and even internet access. I’ve only been able to work since I was fourteen, and you can only work three hours a day until you’re sixteen. But even though we’re broke, Dad has never held food up as something I might not deserve, like my mom used to. I should be grateful.

  Sometimes, though, I wish I could want things without feeling guilty.

  But he’s right. I do know better.

  I do have some money I’ve been saving. I turn to Dad, who has clearly been watching the wheels in my head turning, but he shakes his head.

  “You’re not taking it out of your college savings either.”

  “DAD.”

  “I’m all behind your new interest in not mooning around and playing video games every day, but is it safe to do this thing?”

  “Lots of people do it!”

  “Also, you are not eighteen.”

  “But I will be.”

  “But you’re not. And are you even sure you can finish?”

  “My soul yearns to finish.”

  “Your soul is not the thing that has to power you across 140.6 miles.”

  “I can do this,” I tell him. “The crew is going to help me train. All the Ironman signs say anything is possible.”

  “Yes, like getting into Harvard or West Point or even good old UH.”

  “Or, like swimming, biking, and running into a new era of Miho-hood. Miho 2.0, brought to you by the Ironman Corporation.”

  Dad sighs. I sigh louder.

  “If I had a thousand dollars, I’d buy you a little perspective and some common sense to go with it. You don’t even have a bike. Do you know how much a bike like that costs?”

  “I can do it on my bike.”

  “Your bike has a basket on it, Miho. And a pizza rack—”

  “Well, it’s not welded to the frame!”

  “—and the cut-off ends of ribbons on the handlebars. Maybe I can get you some shoes, if you want some real running shoes. You could run the Honolulu marathon in December! The entry for that is pretty expensive, but I looked into it, and your uncles and I might be able to get it together.”

  “But it has to be an Ironman,” I say, tears prickling in my eyes. “Dad, it has to be.”

  “Miho. Listen. I think it’s great that you want to do this. But look up the bike. Look it up.”

  “Holy mother,” I shout as the search results for “Triathlon Bike” light up my phone. Achilles sits up at the sound, lets out one startled yip, but then flops onto his back and falls asleep with his tongue hanging out. “How can a bike cost twelve thousand dollars?” I whisper.

  “Exactly, Miho. Pick something a little more reasonable.”

  “I’m sick of reasonable. History is not full of reasonable women.”

  “I don’t know why you want to set yourself up to fail.”

  “Isn’t that exactly what you’re trying to do, with this whole college thing?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Something that seems impossible, costs a ton of money, and inspires some dedicated people to work insanely hard and beat the odds? It’s exactly the same.”

  He narrows his eyes at me. I narrow mine right back.

  He breaks first, sighs, throws up his hands.

  Point: Miho.

  chapter nine

  I watch all night. When the crew wakes up, I try to make the play-by-play of the race sound exciting, but even I can’t turn it into a spectator sport: “And then, on the run, the one lady passed the other lady, and then she got passed again forty minutes later!” The most exciting things in triathlon are (1) flying dismounts gone awry and (2) that time Heather Jackson carried a banana during the entire marathon in somewhere called Lake Placid. The only other exciting thing that happens are crashes, and those are scary, not funny.

  Normal people have “running but not getting anywhere” or “in class naked” dreams. I have bike crash dreams. They always start out happy: I’m riding down the coast on a completely empty highway, the wind at my back. I’m flying. But then out of the blue, with no warning, I crash. I hit a rock, or a car hits me, or my bike falls apart underneath me into a pile of wheels and gears. I hit the ground, and it hurts. But that’s not the worst part. After I fall, I can’
t move. My dream-body is bleeding and broken, and I am forced to stare at where I crashed. I always think: I should have seen it coming. I should have been more careful. Because it’s obvious after you crash: you shouldn’t have been on that road, you should have seen the pothole, you should have seen the car. And I lie there for an eternity in dream-time, and no one can help me.

  If I ever have a crash like that, in real life, I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever ride again.

  Dad left before dawn to see if there are any jobs, so Mr. Bu calls us over to his house for coffee and breakfast. We sit on his porch with our legs dangling off the edge, plates of sausage, eggs, and rice in our laps. Then everyone goes home to change. I rush through my chores—dog, trash, weeds, pay bills, prep dinner, do laundry—and head to my room. I put on some old sweatpants, dig out my one and only sports bra, throw on a work shirt with the sleeves cut off, and try to find my old gym shoes from PE. At last, I excavate them from my completely overflowing closet, under a pink linen button-up shirt.

  My heart jumps. I pull my hand back. Scumbucket’s shirt.

  It’s like poison from a snakebite crawling up my arm. The sleeves are still rolled up just so, exactly the way he left it. I know I should throw it away, but…I don’t. I will when I get home. Definitely.

  I look at my phone. Twenty minutes to get to the track. I pull on my shoes and close the closet door.

  * * *