In less than six hours I’d made it to the Honolulu airport, but it wasn’t until the DC-8 finally taxied down the runway and the pressurized air flooded the cabin, lifting my blouse from where it had grafted itself onto my overheated back, that I drew my first full breath. My rage drained away, leaving me empty and nauseated. Browsing the airport newsstands in Los Angeles, I noticed the newspapers getting thicker, more full of the world, but it wasn’t until I reached New York, where the Pacific Rim was barely mentioned in the “A” section of the Times and where no one stared at me, that I could stop looking over my shoulder.
No one tried to stop me from leaving.
No one would ever want to see me return.
Kei
Mama calls you gasa gasa because you are always moving. Do you remember?
You are Kei.
You are the bad one, the selfish one, the troublemaker, and the one who can’t sit still. Is this what you think, or what they say? Sometimes, you feel like two people: half of you watching the other half perform. You are the storyteller and the listener; the audience and the show.
And now, you are the dumb one. Before they moved you to the B class, you and Hana used to swap clothes. You used to sit together in the school yard at recess, ignoring their stupid jokes. “Buy one, get one free!” and “Look at her, always talking to herself, ha-ha!” If the two of you were no longer Koko when you started primary school, still, you had a connection. Whenever yet another kid with bare feet and white fever spots on his teeth tried to do the math with his hands—Brown eye on the left side equals Kei. Her left is my right. My right hand is the one I write with, so this must be…—you both knew exactly when to close your eyes.
But that was primary school, and now you are in the B class. Left alone, you have to run. And you are fast, which makes it less fun for the boys to chase you. The game is to catch you. The reward is to tackle you in the grass. You thought it was about the press. The skin smell. The tumble that kept going and the weight that didn’t lift even when the tumble stopped. But then they started throwing rocks at a new girl, to bring her down when she escaped them, and recess got so much darker then.
You, they like to ambush. Their favorite game is spit. They surround you like dogs since, in this game, they take turns. You fight back but eventually they throw you on the ground and pin your arms with their knees to make it hard to use your legs to buck them off. It is also hard to breathe. They work up a spitball and then hover their faces over yours and drool. They expect you to squirm away in fear, close your eyes and turn your head. Your only revenge is in locking eyes with them as they do it. The spitball spools down slow, like a cloudy spider. The longer they can make it last, the more all the dog-boys will hoot. The winner is the boy who can lower his thread of spit until it almost hits your face and still suck it back into his mouth.
There are a lot of losers in this game.
Lillie’s father said, Don’t run. You remember that story. He said the coyotes were only there for the chickens. They wouldn’t chase a human, even a small one, if she stood still and looked it in the eye. But Lillie was afraid. The house seemed so far away and she had seen the spray of blood and guts in the coop last time. So she disobeyed to protect herself. She dashed for the house.
She didn’t see the coyote take off to chase her. All she saw was her father’s face in the window, then the barrel of his gun. His scolding that night was not about the fact that she didn’t do what he told her to, or about her mother’s worry that she could have been hurt. It was about the creature that had been killed because of her.
There are consequences, Lillie’s father told her. Even if she’s not the one to suffer them. Trying to escape to save yourself sometimes puts others at unexpected risk. But what Mama didn’t seem to see was that by drawing the coyote’s attention, Lillie had saved the chickens. What if you had to make a choice? you asked her. If you had to choose between lives—coyotes, chickens, yours, Hana’s—how would you know which lives to save?
Mama didn’t answer.
But now, you are running in the school yard. You don’t want to be the boy who was sent to the hospital after they made him crawl over broken bottles, or the girl they tied to a tree. But you are not running to escape. Just as Lillie saved the chickens by getting the coyote to chase her, you are attracting the attention of the dog-boys. You can take the spit, and if you don’t, they will turn on Hana. Together you two were more than they could handle, but she is as helpless as a chicken now and she is all alone.
They called Arnie on his CB. He’s always the one who comes to school when recess gets out of hand. When there’s dirt in your hair and snot as well as drool, and you can’t get it off before the bell rings. Or when one of the other kids in the yard gets nervous and drags a teacher out of the coffee room to show him what’s going on. Sometimes the dog-boys get away with it, with the magical excuse, Jus’ joke. Sometimes, you are red with tears and anger, and you spit back hard, knowing what will happen if you don’t hit your mark. On the days when Arnie has to take you, you usually ride with him while he works. Better if we stay out of your mother’s hair, he says. No need to tell her. And you know better than he does what can happen if you upset her. Mama worries about you more than Hana, so Arnie helps you make sure she never knows. But today’s fight in the school yard was not about the usual boredom and boy energy. Arnie was a long time in the principal’s office, and he came out with a sadness that still hasn’t left his eyes. He didn’t say anything, but you know he’s building up to it. That’s why you’re here. At the new lava field.
Beach chairs lounge in the backs of flatbeds. That’s how Arnie first described it. Fifty cars parked along the road. Men milled between the cars, clutching cans of Primo and Oly. Little kids in pajamas hung off their shoulders, as if anyone could be too short to see this show.
And in the night in front of them, huge plumes of lava danced in the sugarcane field. Orange spittle sailed through the air. It flashed, it flickered, it tumbled down, and it could boil in your ears, too, that’s what Arnie told Mama. Come with me, Miya. It’s beautiful. It’s the best show there is.
You remember when the eruption started. Arnie brought home a picture in the newspaper, where the ground cracked open four feet wide and two miles long.
“Can you imagine?” he teased Mama, grabbing her around her waist. “I would have rescued you before you fell in.”
Hana looked down at her mending and you could feel it, too. The way Arnie looked at Mama, like the achy tooth you can’t stop chewing on. She waved him off; she was not one for explosions, but he kept clowning around, stretching his legs apart to prove that he could save her, and when his long arm snaked out to hug her to him, the smile she gave him was cautious but bright. You know she loved him for the fact that nothing bad had ever happened to him. And the impossible possibility that nothing ever would.
But now, the papayas around you are popping, one by one, like blisters.
They ooze, too, like blisters. Their scent is thick, clogging your nose. You can see their roasted bodies lying in the cinders.
There are only two fountains now, hiding behind the ridge of cinder cones. They are short, and sloppy. The lava spits up, then blackens in midair. Like butterflies in reverse. Bright, breathing creatures returning to their chrysalises. The fishponds are gone. The old theater, too, and the Chevron station and almost all the houses.
The night show is one thing, but mostly the eruption is slow, and unpredictable. It’s a fact of life. A twist of fate. You can’t stop it, but it’s easy to outrun.
“Here,” Arnie says. He hands you a stick of pepperoni. You are sitting together on the sidewall of his flatbed Ford, looking out over the new lava field. Listening to the lazy laughter of the firemen down the road and waiting for one of the few remaining houses to begin to burn.
Their voices drift over, overlapping. They are talking about a baby luau.
“Oh, man, Alfred, he some stingy, yeah? He never like buy nutting. So I we
n ask ’im, ‘Where you wen get um? Da pig. You wen shoot um or buy um?’”
“Nah. Shoot a pig? Alfred neva—”
“Nah. So anyway, I go, ‘Alfred, you wen shoot da pig or what?’ And Alfred, he goes, ‘Nah, dis pig more betta den dat. Dis one get los’ pig. You know—da kine pig get los’ and come inside your yard?’”
“So,” Arnie says, keeping his eyes in the distance as if that will help him catch the firemen’s story. “Want to talk about it?’”
He knows there were fists, but you don’t know what else he knows. You shake your head. You can’t tell him the fight was about Mama, that they were calling her a dumb cow who had had her babies on a cattle boat in the dung. It was the mooing, and the heaving, and the way they swayed their bellies and swung their okoles that got to you, then the way they held you down and started licking you, like they were cleaning off a baby calf. Runt, they called you, their legs splaying open, and you felt something bumping against you from inside their pants. Two scrawny runts, all bloody and bony and covered in dung.
“Your mother is a survivor, Kei.”
Part of you must know he is trying to be comforting, but what you feel is the surge of shame. You feel the rage that powered your fist, how it felt good to hit that kid, even if you got pummeled for it. Now that rage flares again, but it dives around Arnie to hit its true target.
Why couldn’t Mama be normal like everyone else?
“You can’t let ’um get to you, Kei-girl,” Arnie is telling you. “It’s all in how you look at it.” He gestures to the orange fountains. “Like, that’s the blood of the goddess, right? And that sound…that’s Pele’s heart. This is a birth. It’s the rock becoming. Transformation, that’s what you have to remember. Everything transforms.”
You feel yourself cringe when he says the word birth, but there is something alive in the air around you. There is a presence, shape-shifting: a dark, earthy power that has always been there.
You aren’t the only ones to think so: In the lee of the cinder cones, there are offerings of flowers and canned food. People have been coming steadily to give thanks to the volcano goddess for the new earth being formed.
“You’ve always been the secretive one,” Arnie is saying. “Like the volcano. I wonder what will come out of you when you do decide to speak?”
Like the volcano. His words. You want to ask him what he means. Mama used to be like a volcano. She used to be pink and flushed, something in her burning. She was fragile, and there was a time when you thought you had pushed her too hard and ruined her forever. That you had to carry the guilt of that forever in the palm of your hand. And though Arnie arrived and seems to have saved her, that guilt is still burning inside you. Maybe, more than the bullying or the loneliness, that guilt is what it is to be Kei.
But of course, you don’t speak. After more than seven years married to Mama, Arnie is still an interloper. You bite into the pepperoni, then pass it back and wipe your hands on your pants. “Thanks.”
Arnie knows that’s as good as you’ll give him. He smiles and sticks his hand in his pocket. It comes out with a few coins. He raises his eyebrows. “Hey, it’s this year’s quarter,” he says to no one in particular as he pushes himself off the flatbed. “Come on, Kei-girl. I know what let’s do.”
Reluctantly, you trail behind him as he heads toward the firemen. There are three of them: a heavy-set man with a small white goatee leaning on the bumper and the two younger guys gesturing midstory. They are tanned. Easy. As if hanging out in the middle of a field of black rock is the most normal thing in the world.
Mama doesn’t socialize with the locals. No potlucks at the girls’ club. No plate lunch at the beach. The sound of pidgin, the lilting local way of talking, sometimes makes her flinch. She keeps to herself, to our kind, as she says it, but you notice she stays away from Japanese Americans, too. Maybe it’s groups she doesn’t like, or strangers. Hana is the same way. This isolation hasn’t helped you get along in school. By yourself, you would never approach these men. But Arnie is different. He assumes everyone is his friend.
“So what?” Arnie asks. He is using his pretend pidgin. “Busy?”
His inflection sounds wrong. Or maybe it’s his expression, the way that, when he wants to point to something, he jerks his chin at the same time. Now that you’re in school, you can hear it: as if he can’t quite speak their language, but if he talks loudly enough everything will be clear.
But the older man doesn’t notice that Arnie doesn’t belong. He puts out his hand for a hearty shake and they thump shoulders. His hard hat is almost falling off the back of his head. “Eh, brah,” he says. “Wat’chu doing? No work, hah?” Arnie is introduced to one of the other guys, and then greets the last one, whom he seems to know. Arnie’s skin stands out red against the other men’s, and white behind his ears. They are nice to him anyway, and when Arnie jogs back to his truck, they even smile at you as they joke around with each other and poke for things in their compartments. There is something in the air, something jolly Arnie has put into motion.
When he returns, he holds an iron pipe in his hand, about six feet long. “The flow of 1960, Kei-girl,” he says, explaining nothing. And then, over your head, he calls, “Eh! Got’um, brah.”
Arnie takes your hand and pulls you toward the edge of the lava. You are feeling his rough hand in yours, thinking you’re too old for this but thinking, too, it feels nice to be led. You do not think he will let you get hurt. The flow lies close to the road like a vast sleeping animal. It breathes on your feet and ankles. So close, you can see a few cracks in the crust a ways off, and the deep orange-red inside them. The lava is a trickster. It’s still alive.
Arnie taps the crust with the pipe. Hit it harder, the firemen egg him on. Break it. He hefts the pipe above his head like a spear and thrusts it into the rock. The crust gives way. The end of the pipe sinks into the glowing lava, pulling a dark orange blob back out with it, like soft dough.
There’s much excitement, and crows of encouragement. One of the firemen hugs you to celebrate this wonderful thing Arnie has done. It’s a touch that’s over almost as soon as you become aware of it and yet the heat of it lingers. You find yourself smiling, with the ripples of heat, and the smell of exploding papayas and sulfur and the musky smell of man all swirling into one. Arnie is shaking the pipe and the lava falls into the dirt in several blobs, some bigger than others. He drops a quarter onto the one closest to him, and the firemen crowd in, dropping their own coins until all of the bits of lava are covered. They press their coins into the lava with sticks and rocks so that it curls around their edges. There is a hose beside you. The man with the runaway hard hat sprays the coins with water and the color flickers and fades.
“Whoo whee! Nineteen sixty. It says right there.” Arnie moves to pick one up, but it’s much too hot to touch. “Crap.” He jumps, laughing, burning himself on the steam coming off the quarter, and the fireman turns the hose on Arnie’s fingers, then back on the coins. “Stupid,” Arnie says, about himself, but at the same time he’s dancing around, shaking his hand and dodging the bits of lava. The firefighters laugh. You are laughing, too.
When the guy with the hose goes off to get a bucket, you find yourself crouching beside the soft curl of lava around Arnie’s quarter. If you touch it, you imagine, the metal will melt like chocolate around the tip of your index finger. Liquid rock. Rock that could take any shape. Your palm itself is cupped, the deep cut from the glass more than half your life ago still pulling it into puckers. You imagine how the lava would melt over it, releasing your hand to open completely and covering the scars.
It is 1960, you think. This is the turning point. The year when something sleeping will erupt to the surface, and a new life will begin.
The guy who hugged you has a shovel. He’s waiting for you to stand so he can lift the quarter into the bucket to cool. As you do, his face comes into focus. His smile is crooked, and you tilt your own smile in response. His eyes have faint lines around th
em, and his hair sticks off his head like mown grass. You are suddenly aware of everything about him: scuffed boots, stubby, callused fingers, square nails. The way his heart beats in the indentation of his throat.
“I like try,” he says, pulling a handful of coins from his pocket.
Arnie nods, but then he hands the pipe to you. “You first, Kei-girl. It’s your turn.”
Hana
The Eckert Trauma Center was an old redbrick building. It resembled a Catholic school from the outside; inside, the walls were bright and plain, not the sagging, paint-loaded surfaces I’d come to expect in the hundred-year-old structures of New York. After all my worries, the hospital had needed only a Xerox of an ID and insurance card for Kei’s transfer. For now, we were both Hanako Swanson. Fortunately, since I was registering my sister, no one thought to ask for my ID.
I took the elevator to the third floor. Though the building itself aged as I rose through it—the carpet in the waiting room gave way to tile in the halls where medicine or bedpans were more likely to spill—it felt like a good place for Kei to be.
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