Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  “I dream of equatorial heat that made skin blister. I wake with searing arms and legs. Dreams can be so real. I dream of rains, torrential, endless jungle rains. I know they will end. They always did. I know the stars will come again. If only I lie still . . .”

  KA HULIAU

  Turning Point

  HE SAT AT HIS MOTHER’S GRAVE, STILL IN A WILDERNESS OF grief. There was nothing left to say, yet his lips moved rapidly, repeating and repeating. He had come here every day for weeks, until being here became so natural his mind wandered, he could have been playing cards, practising his horn. He sat plucking the grass, distracted, a man with no plot, no direction.

  Among garish-colored wreaths on headstones, an old woman stood in the distance, dressed in gray. From the shadows of a tree she watched while Keo shielded his face from a sun stubbornly keeping abreast of him. An hour passed, or two. He heaved and groped in his personal darkness.

  “Mama. I had such dreams. You never told me dreams grow old. Now I wonder . . . what next?” He shook his head. “I play, but there’s a silence I can’t fill. All the sound dies out inside me.”

  Approaching slowly with her cane, she stared at meek folds of his neck, hair now shot with silver, which would in time give him distinction. She had not been this close to him in almost twenty years. Dark skin still unwrinkled, lean, rather muscular physique. He was still a smart dresser, silk shirts, linen trousers. He still shunned rubber slippers, favoring leather shoes. There was still something electric, a tension in him.

  He didn’t notice her approaching, sitting near him on the grass. He lay facedown on his mother’s grave and dozed, not hearing her voice that spoke a long, soft time.

  “KEO, DEAR, REMEMBER THE TEACUP. THOUGH IT EMPTIES, ITS concaveness still implies the tea. Tea-ness lingers. As long as you remember her, she lives.

  “Days will come when you will without consciousness gather in all your wandering memories, and they will rebirth your mama. The day you and your papa did thus and such with her. The first time you and she went to church alone. The nights she watched you rebuild wooden hammers in your Steinway, trying hard to understand. The first time she heard you play trumpet. Her wild pride. These memories will all come home like prodigals.

  “One day you’ll remember walking toward that garage forever up the lane, a path of startling trees and drunk-making flowers. You’ll remember the oil tablecloth and faces of loved neighbors sharing good-fun days of light and shade beneath that shuddering foliage. You’ll always approach the memory from the entrance to the lane. Because you will always be coming home from a distance. . . .

  “Time will be your prism, through which you distinguish features of relatives and friends, lips serenely moving in forgotten speech, in Pidgin. You’ll remember nights in the garage, the wooden picnic table where you celebrated birthdays and namedays and confirmations. The table laid for modest meals. You’ll smell your mother’s cooking, your father’s tobacco, fish smell of DeSoto’s nets, Malia’s French perfumes.

  “You’ll note the tweak of small green geckos brushing your hair, one falling to your sister’s head, your sister leaping, neighbors bent with laughter. And lying across the table will be your father’s arm, muscled, blue-veined, turned up in the bare-bulbed light of the garage. He’ll fill a plate of food, keeping busy, so no one will see his eyes. You, his favorite son, are home. You’ll hug your mother, brothers, sister, then almost lazily reach for the full plate from your father. No one will notice the look you two exchange, the way your eyes fill, your jaws clench with emotion. . . .

  “And always in the center will be your mama, slow-moving and beautiful. In the place where a neighbor sits, there will be a succession of replacements. Mary Chang will turn into Rosie Perez who will turn into Mrs. Palama. Mr. Kimuro will become Mr. Silva, then Johnny Huli. Tacky Cruz, the rooster, will turn into someone’s mongoose, who will become the dog named God who always ran backwards. One of DeSoto’s sons will turn into brother Jonah, and he will turn into his namesake, Baby Jonah, who will turn from a child into a young woman. The whole array of trembling transformations will be repeated, overlapping and disordered, for this is how we remember.

  “But always there will be your mama, the center of your pattern. And just when colors and outlines and faces settle into a formula you can understand, a knob will be touched, a torrent of sounds will pour forth, voices Pidgining, singing. Ice rattling in DeSoto’s beer cooler, someone strumming slack-key guitar. Sounds will ebb, then return as different sounds. Folks older now, remembering other folks, laughing, weeping. A dozen voices drowning yours, a dozen hearts out-thumping yours. A hundred doors swung wide, the sough and sigh of living.

  “And out beyond your lane, Keo, there will be other lanes. And streets and avenues. And then above, behind, around it all, will be the sea, the Mother Sea, crashing and defying, destroying and rebirthing. Applauding all we know as life . . .”

  STILL HE DOZED, ONLY HALF HEARING THE SOFT, SOLEMN VOICE. Later, much later, he would think her words had been his words, her thoughts his realizations, and it would bring a certain peace. She sat a while, smiling faintly. Her hand hovered over his sleeping head, just for a second, just close enough to remember. She limped away.

  IN WAIKIKI, BANDS IMITATED ELVIS PRESLEY. CHUBBY CHECKER had arrived and people danced to something frantic called The Twist. At the Swing Club, jazz crowds ebbed and flowed; one night it was packed, the next night only four tables occupied. Some nights Keo and Endo drowned their frustrations in rum.

  “You could alternate,” Endo said. “One set jazz, one set rock and roll.”

  Keo shook his head. “I don’t have the ear for that stuff. Or the stomach.” He refilled their glasses. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with us. Melancholy. Built strictly for jazz.”

  While they talked he studied Endo, the sad blue face, odd-shaped eyes like a man sobbing politely. In the last year he had started trembling, and complained of terrible headaches. Some days he seemed drunk when he wasn’t. His coordination was failing. Keo wondered about his hearing. Some nights when Endo sat in with the band, no one knew what he was playing. It didn’t sound like jazz. It didn’t sound like anything. His skin was now a deeper blue, his fingernails almost black.

  Keo hadn’t spent time with him in weeks. The death of his nephew, then his mother. Time spent with his father and DeSoto.

  “I’m sorry, man. This family stuff. Grief makes folks crazy.”

  “I understand.” Even Endo’s voice had changed, now hoarse and grating. “When I found out my family . . . Tokyo reduced to ash . . . I think I lost my mind completely.”

  They had touched on this before, Keo hoping talk might help him. “Do you remember surrendering? VJ Day?”

  He shook his head no. “I remember jungle. . . .”

  “Maybe we’re not supposed to remember. I forget for months, then one night I sit up screaming, my fingers jerking wire round a neck. Another guy I smothered, sat on with a pillow—I feel him thrashing under my backside.”

  He shuddered, slugging back his rum.

  “At least you have memories,” Endo said.

  “If I could just find out what happened to Sunny. Even if she’s dead. Don’t you remember her in Paris?”

  “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I remember so little now.”

  “A few years back, I learned she might have been kidnapped in Shanghai. Japanese soldiers.”

  Endo slowly nodded. “In every war, for every army—Allies, Japanese, a thousand years ago the Mongols—there are women used for that.”

  “Did you have kidnapped women in the jungle?”

  “Oh . . . yes. We had thousands and thousands of men, extraordinary needs. There were women kept in barracks, huts, even hotels.”

  “Do you remember names? Nationalities?”

  Endo looked through him. “They were given Japanese names. Nationalities? So many. I might have spent time with one or two. Relief, you see. I already knew we were losing the war. After Midway
, we were finished. It was killing me.”

  He buried his face in his hands. “I followed my orders, sent thousands of our young men to their deaths. Sacrifices, all! The jackals running our war would not let us surrender. They lied to Hirohito, our emperor. He thought we were winning. They sacrificed millions of young boys all over Asia, the Pacific. They killed my parents, killed everyone!”

  He swayed side to side, trying to wrench himself apart so that some human voice might cry out of its suffering.

  A little drunk, Keo put his arm round Endo’s shoulder.

  “ ’Ey, let’s relax. Take time off. Go fishing in DeSoto’s canoe . . .”

  Endo reared back. “Not the sea! It horrifies me. I see bombed ships. Corpses boiling in blood.”

  Keo thought again. “How’s about going hunting in the Ko‘olaus. Good pua‘a, wild pig, hunting season now. No rains, no mudslides. That’s why you see so many trucks with pig heads mounted on the hoods.”

  Endo pulled himself together. “Uncle Yasunari and I used to go duck and pheasant hunting. Tramping out at dawn, smell of leather, oiled rifle stocks. I would like that, Keo, if you have the time.”

  One day before dawn with a cousin’s pickup and two boarhounds, they set off for the jungles of the jagged Ko‘olau Mountains separating Honolulu from the windward side of O‘ahu. The Pali road was treacherous, two narrow lanes on hairpin curves balanced on the edge of cliffs two thousand feet high. Engineers had already begun the Pali Tunnel project, cutting through the heart of the Ko‘olaus, which would make the cliff road obsolete. But even now, landslide boulders sometimes crushed the roofs of passing cars.

  Twisting and turning up the mountain, Keo found the turnoff that took them half a mile into the jungle. He parked, and they began to hike deep into pua‘a territory. After another mile they entered dense rain forest, beneath canopies of giant ironwoods and boxwoods. Keo pointed out trees vital to early Hawai‘ians—koa, from which the hulls of great oceangoing canoes were fashioned. Hau, traditional wood used for outriggers. Breadfruit, whose sap served as binder with coconut fibers for the final caulking of canoes.

  As the jungle deepened, Endo spun in circles, feeling something tap his back.

  Keo grinned. “Playful akua. Spirits.”

  Two miles up the mountain, they saw in distant panorama the other side of the Ko‘olaus. Flutings eroded by rain-fed waterfalls rippled the face of the Pali, the great jade cliff stretching twenty-two miles along windward O‘ahu. Eons ago, pounding waves had carved the nearly vertical rampart as sea levels rose. When seas receded, volcanic rock on the valley floor weathered into soil. Over centuries, the valley spread out like a lush green carpet rolling on for miles, a vast amphitheatre for the jagged vertebrae of the Ko‘olaus. Beyond it, the heaving sea.

  Endo gasped. “Such violent beauty.”

  Somewhere, the squealing of a pig. They moved slowly now. Mist shrouded everything in gauze, streaking dark silhouettes of trees, softening rough edges of boulders in streams. In eerie half-light, owls ghosted from branches, drifting soundlessly. Light changed from indigo to violet, then shot the trees in fiery tapestries of sunrise.

  The boarhounds had vanished, hunting in silence. Only when they cornered pua‘a would barking begin.

  “Then you run,” Keo said. “And you keep running till you get there. If it’s a sow, there’s not much danger. But a boar can lay a dog open with one swipe of his tusks. The others will keep crowding in, insane. Look. See what tusks can do?”

  Bases of trees and patches of forest floor were slashed and gouged where pigs had found choice beds of roots. Just beyond one of these, Keo broke into a run. Endo followed, hearing jungle sounds that confused him, made him think it was 1942.

  He spun in circles. My sword. Where is my sword? It must be near.

  The hounds had cornered a wild pig up a winding streambed. Lungs bursting, legs on the point of collapse, Endo reached the area minutes after Keo. The wind shifted, a giant leaf hung down, and in that moment Keo appeared headless. Endo screamed. The leaf swayed, and Endo saw the head connected to the body.

  But in that instant, things came at him. Sun glittering on a metal bucket from which I scooped water, pouring it over both sides of my sword blade. The sword arcing gracefully. Smell of gushing blood. Someone wiping clean my blade . . . Remembering now, he staggered.

  The snorting sow had backed into a culvert, holding the frenzied hounds at bay. Keo climbed a tree and shot her directly behind the ear. She shuddered, spraying excrement, and then collapsed. Endo felt chilled, felt mild excitement. He knelt, staring at the sow’s thick neck. How cleanly, how easily, with one graceful swipe, the head could be cut from the body. His eyes darted to the hounds. Their necks were short and ugly, it would be hard to hold them still. But with my sword, execution would be flawless. . . . He would not look at Keo’s neck.

  Almost formally, he stood. “Well done. One bullet. As it should be.”

  Dogs scattered, hunting for another pig. The two men rested, Keo describing the vicious cloven hooves of pua‘a, but Endo didn’t hear him.

  . . . I was such a master. They say I raised it to pure art. I could scan a crowd and in five seconds know whose neck was best. Whose fleshy composition would pose a sloppy job . . .

  Later, he held the carcass while Keo cleaned and dressed it. The blood and gore did not excite him. The kill was over. Kneeling beside the sow, he drifted, remembering things. Things remembered him.

  Afterwards, I was always numb for hours. I could put lit matches to my arms. Once, after taking a head, there were bombs; I was hit by shrapnel, yet did not notice. The time I took six native heads one after another, it was ballet. Later, I stood barefoot in that scorpion nest. They went berserk, stinging me, and I felt nothing. Nothing! So stimulated I was immune to their poison. They curled up and died from my adrenaline. Eleven years? Twelve? Why am I remembering?

  They heard the howling dogs again. Leaving the female carcass hanging in a tree, they rushed through thorny kiawe that slashed their arms and faces. This time the hounds had cornered a huge young boar, nearly three hundred pounds, all flashing tusks and hooves. Only Keo’s speed saved them from laceration. He fired shots into the air until the dogs fell back.

  “Smell of blood makes them crazy. They’re so high, they wouldn’t know if he ripped into them.”

  The moment froze, the boar froze. For a second it twisted its head crazily, and Endo saw razor-sharp hairs part on its neck, saw the pink flesh beneath. A good neck. It would be easy. One quick slice . . .

  The shot lifted the pig into the air. It landed grunting, wounded in the shoulder. Keo cursed, shot it again between the eyes. A messy shot, ruining the head for mounting. The men collapsed, exhausted, while hounds lapped at the blood. Keo saw their penises eerily erect. Why did living things do that in the face of death? Senses so keen and sharp, blood engorged the penis. His mind wandered, he thought how long it had been since he was engorged, since he felt bone-deep passion and desire.

  He looked up self-consciously, as if the other man could read his mind. Then he remembered it was blue-faced Endo, whom, probably, nothing could shock. He suspected he had seen so much flesh in various contexts—tortured, dying, dead—his response to human bodies was boredom. He remembered Endo with beautiful Parisian girls, how they had loved his courtliness. Now he seemed to barely notice women.

  Who did this to us? Keo wondered. Who left us for dead?

  “Endo. Have you got a woman? Here in Honolulu?”

  He looked down, shy. “Sometimes I go to prostitutes. Just release. I try, but I feel nothing. I only feel when I blow saxophone. Jazz, the way we play—the old, pure, searching way—it takes me back to innocence.” He shook his head. “Whatever I once blew, I’m running out of it.”

  Watching the hounds lolling in blood, they talked until it seemed they had reached the bottom of things. A false bottom, certain things not touched upon. The fact that Endo was waiting to die. Though he had once been the enemy, Keo no
w saw his pain as ennobling, austere.

  We’re both empty shells. Loveless, childless. Except that he was wrenched from youth to serve his emperor. I was only searching for a girl.

  “Endo . . . you ever think of suicide?”

  He laughed softly. “That isn’t necessary. All I have to do is wait.” He pointed to his bluish face, his nearly black fingernails. “It’s really rather dull, dying. One has to walk so slowly toward it.”

  “You’ve been to specialists. Can’t they help you?”

  “They want to put me under glass, a guinea pig. I have no sentiments to spare for science. My only fear is that insanity will take me first.”

  They stood and bent to the arduous task of cleaning and dressing the boar. Leaving the sow hanging in the tree for cousins, they dragged the gamy male down guava-laden slopes, skidding on their butts down slippery ravines. They made it to the truck by twilight, wrapping the carcass in rags and tarpaulin and ropes. Keo tapped each hound on the nose with his rifle, reminding them the carcass was kapu. He gave them pans of stream water, rubbing each one vigorously for being first-rate boarhounds.

  In near darkness, heavy fog descended. It was like driving snow-blind. Twice Keo braked, blowing his horn at what looked like spectres spinning into their headlights. A flaming white bush flung itself across the hood, almost cracking the windshield.

  “Iiiii! What is it?” Endo cried.

  “Angry akua. We’re driving the Pali Road with pork. It’s kapu!”

  Outside a shrieking. Even the dogs howled with terror. Keo stopped the truck, got out, and raised his hands, lifting his head to heaven, chanting in Hawai‘ian.

  “Noi e kala‘ia! . . . Ho‘okmakamaka! . . . Kala mai! . . . Kala mai!”