Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  “Compelling . . . Davenport’s gargantuan family epic . . . juggles the elements admirably as she moves from Hawaiian rain forests to downtown Manhattan, slipping easily from the fantastic to the actual. . . Breathtaking.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Everything about this . . . novel is larger than life. Extravagant.”

  —Anniston Star

  “An epic novel. . . panoramic ... In the end, the book’s strongest driving force is love ... Has an intimacy and a personal immediacy most such sweeping novels lack.”

  —Islands

  “Lush, imaginative, and filled with seductive mythology. Shark Dialogues seems to capture the essence of Hawaii itself.”

  —San Gabriel Valley Tribune

  * * *

  KIANA DAVENPORT was born and raised in Kalihi, of Hawaiian and Anglo-American descent. Author of three previous novels, she was a 1992-93 Fiction Fellow at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute and received a 1992 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She lives in Boston and Hawaii.

  Shark

  Dialogues

  Kiana Davenport

  PLUME

  Published by Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition by Atheneum. For information address Simon & Schuster, 866 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022.

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  First Plume Printing, August 1995

  25 24 23 22

  Copyright © Kiana Davenport, 1994

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to editors of the following publications in which chapters of this book first appeared in slightly different form: Home to Stay, Asian-American Women’s Fiction, Greenfield Review Press, 1990; Daily Fare, Essays from the Multicultural Experience, University of Georgia Press, 1993; Charlie Chan Is Dead, Contemporary Asian-American Fiction, Viking Penguin, 1994.

  Owing to limitations of space, all other acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material can be found on pages 491-92.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Davenport, Kiana.

  Shark dialogues / Kiana Davenport.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-452-27458-7

  eISBN 978-1-439-19243-6

  1. Women—Hawaii—Fiction. 2. Hawaii—Fiction. I. Title

  [PS3554.A88S5 1995]

  813’.54—dc20 95-737

  Printed in the United States of America

  Original hardcover design by Liney Li

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  To the memory of my mother,

  Emma Kealoha

  •

  To the memory of my aunty,

  Minnie Kelomika Kam

  •

  To my ‘Ohana, the Houghtailings of Honolulu

  •

  And to the Warriors of Kalaupapa,

  those past, and those who live on

  with courage and dignity

  Acknowledgments

  For grants and fellowships awarded during the years in which this novel was written, the author gratefully thanks: the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, the Syvenna Foundation, and Cottages at Hedgebrook.

  And heartfelt thanks to Lee Goerner and Harriet Wasserman.

  “Hanau Kumulipo i ka po, he kane

  Hanau Po‘ele i ka po, he wahine

  O kane ia Wai‘ololi, O ka wahine ka Wai‘olola

  . . . Ua hanau-mano ko‘u akua . . .

  . . . Hanau mano iloko o Hina-ia-‘ele‘ele . . .

  Born was Kumulipo in the night, a male

  Born was Po‘ele in the night, a female

  Male for the narrow waters, female for the broad waters

  . . . Born a shark was my god

  Born a shark in the month of Hinaia‘ele‘ele . . .”

  —from Kumulipo, Hawaiian Chant of Creation,

  Re-interpreted by Rubellite Kawena Johnson

  •

  “. . . She was born on an island,

  and that is already a beginning of solitude

  —Marguerite Yourcenar, Fires

  SHARK DIALOGUES

  Ka ‘Ōlelo

  Makuahine

  Mother Tongue

  Run Run

  * * *

  ‘SAILORS, LEPERS, OPIUM, SPIES—with such a family history, how could we be anyt’ing but sluts?”

  Dese Jess’s last words to her grandmot’er, Pono. Dat night Pono walk into da sea. But dis happen later, much later, after Ming rinse from our lives full of Dragon Seed. After Vanya become a terrorist, and Hiro suffocate from his own tattoos. It happen long years after dese little half-orphan girls—Vanya, Ming, Rachel, Jess—swim into Pono’s life. I seen. I seen it all. Da years dey run from her. Da years she pull dem back, like bait. So, in a way, dis my history, too.

  Now, “talk story” time. Early 1990s. Dese four cousins comin’ home. Grown women, now, life t’rown everyt’ing at dem. But on dis island, dey still called “Pono’s girls.” And when she call, dey come.

  Ka Hale o Nā Kīkepa Kea

  * * *

  House of White Sarongs

  JESS MONTGOMERY SAT ON A PLANE pouring west against the sunset. Beside her, a man clutching a deadly colored drink examined her closely, once and for all, so he
wouldn’t have to think of her again, for she was pretty, but verging on plain.

  She looked down at her strong, square hands, the hands of a healer, a woman whose days were spent in humid rooms with the rusty aroma of blood, her language the haphazard argot of surgery, incisions, exorcisms. She smiled, remembering a handsome, satyr-thighed retriever who woke during surgery and bit her wrist while his bad parts went swish-swish down the drain. Recovering herself in his recovery. A dying Siamese, its final face waiting for her inside its cage, eyes like needles flashing, aloof to the very end. Jess holding its head with grave esteem.

  Some were like humans: false pregnancies, malignant breasts, attempted suicides. She healed them and used them, their patience, their resignation, hoping their strength would penetrate into the impenetrable thing of her life. Sometimes she leaned her head against a cage and drifted. One can live without thinking.

  Sometimes, caught off guard, she thought of her ex-husband and how, toward the end, sex with him had left her with the sensation of having brushed against death. Or, she thought of him and her daughter, a team, and how the day she understood she was excluded from their world, she had reeled from the house out into the streets, the crowds, and dusk and dark and nothing.

  Some nights when her assistants had left, she sat in her clinic among the cages, just to be near breathing things who allowed her to ache without comment, without observation. She didn’t know what to want anymore, so much of life was incomprehensible.

  A bishop, looking feudal and cruel, swept past her down the aisle. Behind her, two businessmen began debating the three great inflationary periods since the birth of Christ. Exhausted, Jess leaned back in her seat, fell into slumber so profound, later when she woke, actual human voices made her gasp.

  Young faces dripped into her dreams, she and her cousins coming of age in their grandmother’s house, overlooking the Pacific. The house was set in coffee orchards in the misty blue hills of Captain Cook, part of an archipelago of tiny towns with “talk-song” names—Hōlualoa, Kainali‘u, Kealakekua, Honaunau—the coffee-growing belt of the district of Kona, set high on an island so lush and volatile and mystic, it had too many names. Island of Hawai‘i. Pele’s Island. Volcano Island. Orchid Island. Because it was so huge, big enough to encompass all the other major islands of Hawai‘i, locals called it simply the Big Island.

  In those summers in that house, four young girls had slept like the dead, stroking through torched-sugar nights, dreaming through gauzy harems of the afternoons. Something lay its hand on them, they couldn’t stay awake. Later they would swear they slept for years, slept their way into womanhood in that strange, enchanted place. In other time zones, other latitudes, Jess would close her eyes and feel the moisture-laden trades. Wind searches its haunted rooms, turning pages of a book. A delicate slip laid across a koa chair breathes of itself. A letter trembles. Orchids sweep across the lānai. The life of each girl began before that house, but it so enveloped them, that was what they chose to remember as their beginning.

  At first men came too, fathers, husbands, brothers. But something in Pono’s house diminished men. They couldn’t stay. It became a place of women, cautious, whispering, filling up the gaping mouths of doorways. Their mothers brought them in the early years (except for Jess, sent from the mainland on her own). And when the mothers could no longer bear the burden of the house, what it contained, they sent their daughters there alone, threw them across the sea like human sacrifices. The girls grew inextricably close, turning away from the rest of the world. Entering Pono’s house, they entered a kind of Ice Age.

  Arriving in their early years, not yet in their teens, and seeing their grandmother waiting at the door, something like fatigue came over them. They moved slower, to accommodate their fear. Pono was a giant woman, pure-blood Hawaiian, her beauty legendary. She was also kahuna, she could look someone to death. The cane she carried, made of human spine, was said to be that of a lover who betrayed her. She possessed a rosary of human molars. At night, it was said, her teeth grew into points. How she came to own the big house, the coffee plantation, so much land, was never known. There were rumors. Part of each month she disappeared.

  “We had no father,” Vanya’s mother whispered.

  “She never wanted us,” Jess’s mother said.

  Ming’s mother only shook her head, possessing some awful, unsay-able knowledge.

  One summer the girls found sepia snapshots—their mothers as young girls in Catholic uniforms, a sorrowful generosity in their eyes, as if they were forgiving the viewer for transgressions committed down the decades. In the years after World War II, their mothers had turned perverse. One married a Chinese descendant of cane-cutters, stoop-work “coolies” with permanently bent backs. Another ran off with a Filipino, a Pidgin-speaking busboy. Rachel’s mother left her infant in Pono’s kitchen, and disappeared forever. Jess’s mother went all the way, eloping with a haole,* who took her to the East Coast of the U.S. mainland. In this way, Pono’s grandchildren were all mixed-marriage mongrels, their mothers’ revenge. At sixteen, Rachel would double that revenge, marrying a Yakuza, a walking tattoo.

  As summers passed, the cousins were absorbed into the town of Captain Cook, yet still seemed to float outside it, inviolate, lit against the formidable backdrop of Pono. On Sundays, they peered from her old black Buick like flowers passing in a bowl, Pono steering imperiously, dressed like a duchess. When she drove her four-wheel Jeep, she was a frontier woman, hunched over, alert, the girls bouncing raucously around her. But when she drove the rusty pickup, her girls in back like hostages, she drove like a psychopath, ignoring Stop signs, traffic lights, as if behind that wheel, ancestral blood of helmsmen drummed within her. Had cannibal warriors crossing three thousand miles of ocean yielded right-of-way?

  To most locals, the girls were indistinguishable, called simply “Pono’s girls,” aloof, of slightly different hues. Only Run Run, the cook, and Pono’s field hands, could tell them apart. Ming, Hawaiian-Chinese, was delicate, “one pound powder” pale. Vanya, Hawaiian-Filipino, had rich, brown island skin, a quick temper. Rachel, Hawaiian and maybe Japanese (or Korean, or Mongol, who knew?), possessed the fairness of peach blossoms and apple jade, her beauty so perfectly proportioned it hurt to look at her. Jess was ruddy-skinned, fair in winter, red then tan in summer.

  Gangly mix-bloods, their teenage years were filled with Jeep runs round the island, up to Waimea and Honoka‘a for the rodeos, pageantry of the Grand Entry, the breath-stopping theater of champion paniolo, Hawaiian cowboys, in bareback bronco and bull-riding contests.

  Pono loved the spectacle. “Paniolo the only men left with true Hawaiian mana.”

  Those summers would always be mingled in Jess’s memory with horse-sweat man-sweat stench of furious bulls manure and fear shave-ice wet hay pineapple-spears a circus-smell excitement expectation as they approached the grounds flying dust of bullrings catching in her eyes aureoling fence posts the bands the paniolo turning everything into a dream and clowns warming up the crowds and hula girls and bands then paniolo riding out resplendent on their mounts waving to the crowds to her then disappearing minutes later exploding back into the ring bareback on wild broncos Jess screaming huddling on wooden grandstand benches in the asylum of Pono’s wings horrified as blood spattered azure plush of embroidered cowboy shirts and bright pink and purple chaps and golden muscular Hawaiian stomachs slashed open guts like blue oysters raw sea urchins spilling out so that rodeos and Puerto Rican kachi-kachi bands smell of blood rawhide and saddles rinsed into heavy smell of sugarcane sweet gardenia smell of “Kona snow” white blossoms of the coffee trees in her grandmother’s fields. Her youth.

  In that large, restless house of water-haunted sunlight, the kitchen was where they discovered their real history. Stories heard from Run Run, the cook, drugged them, startled them, fleshed and shaped their evolution. As she talked, her hands were busy whacking bloody chicken parts, dripping grease from laulau, cheroot of dried cuttlefish hanging from her l
ips.

  “Dat missin’ fingah on yoah tūtū’s hand, from pineapple sliceah at Dole Cannery. You know how many years she punched time clock at dat evil place? You know foah why? So could send yoah mot’ers private Catholic school, so dey no turn out gum-chewin’ whores on Hotel Street. Dis da truth, foah shoah!”

  Arriving in late spring, the girls were always given separate rooms. Pono didn’t want them mixing up their dreams. But, later, while she snored, their white sleeping sarongs licked the dark like candles as they explored secret rooms, lagoons of the forbidden, then tumbled into a big koa four-poster, mosquito net like albino skin muffling their laughter. Concentrating their attention, they would examine each other, compare changes each year had wrought, Jess’s new body odor, the way Vanya’s breasts were forming, the way hair grew under arms. They were half of each other’s blood; what happened to one happened to the others.

  Some nights they gossiped for hours, so buoyed up by each other, they felt nothing in life would be able to resist them, nothing would happen to them accidentally. Finally, in a confusion of limbs, they slept, windows thrown wide, only a shivering net between them and the vast Pacific, exploding planets in a carnival of sky. Sometimes tradewinds galloped through with such force, when they woke it seemed a giant finger had moved the furniture across the room.

  Some nights without warning, Pono would shake them, wake them before dawn, drive to a secret beach where they scoured the shore with Coleman lanterns, looking for treasures washed in from the Orient. Blue glass fishing floats from Japanese fleets working tuna longlines in the Bering Sea, ivory mah-jongg tiles, gold jewelry, rare colored bottles, ceramic jugs with Cyrillic lettering. By midmorning, exhausted, the girls would drowse along the beach, until Pono piled them into the Jeep. Headed for home she would “talk story,” telling how they were descended from the daughter of a great Tahitian chief, a fearless swimmer and Eater of Stones, a woman who fought for Queen Lili‘uokalani, last monarch of Hawai‘i.