Again, she learned to barter dreams in exchange for food. Housewives fed her saimin, swept places on their floor where she could sleep, then squatted beside her, waiting to hear their futures. Chinese fortune-tellers ambushed her, burying her in barrels of slop for stealing away their customers. She moved to another part of Chinatown.
Staking out a bench in A’ala Park, one morning Pono woke to find a Japanese woman and child staring at her.
“Too beautiful,” the woman said. “I look like you, make moah money wit sailahs.”
She was no more than twenty-four, made up with thick rice powder, carmine heavy at her eyes. A phony mole danced across her cheek around which curved an exaggerated spit curl. Her hair was fashionably short and she wore a tight satin cheongsam and high heels that made her totter. Under the makeup, one could see she was very plain. Pono asked what she did with her daughter while she slept with sailors.
The woman giggled. “She one good keed. Sit in chair, face to da wall.”
The girl was nine, a little moonface with bright almond eyes. Her name was Run Run, and she lay her hand on Pono’s knee, a puppy offering its paw.
Pono took the hand and sobbed. “I’m just fourteen. My parents thrown me out.”
The prostitute moved closer on the bench. “My husband leave me for pretty girl. Hey, maybe we make one team!”
Her name was Miko, and she took Pono home to a stifling, windowless room, only a bed and basin. “You work wit’ me, you bring moah bettah business!”
That night, Pono lay on the floor, holding the tiny hand of Run Run as it hung from the bed. Her other hand clasped her mother asleep with her eyelids Scotch-taped into haole double-folds. Pono slept heavily and dreamed of herself in rubber gloves, catching slippery golden cylinders, twirling them in her palm. Around her, women with white balloon heads waved with hands missing fingers, missing thumbs. Then she saw herself and the girl, Run Run, grown into older women, dancing in showers of cinnamon.
The next morning, Pono went to Dole Cannery, knowing from her dream they would be hiring. She stood on an assembly line, clutching a small knife with rubber gloves, catching pineapples sliding out of skinning machines, then trimming off the eyes and extra bits of skin. Around her, older women, pros, in aprons and big, stiff white hair nets, coached her, showed her how to hold the knife, slicing and spinning the fruit expertly, some with missing fingers, hands mauled in processing machines.
She and Miko found a larger room with a window and two beds. At dawn, while Pono worked the cannery, Miko and Run Run slept. At night, while Miko worked the streets, Pono sat with Run Run, growing to love the sorrowful wisdom of her eyes, a child trained to keep her face turned to the wall.
They were an odd sight—a tired street whore, her wise-eyed child, and a giant Polynesian beauty—as they explored the wonders of Honolulu: Aloha Tower where great liners docked, ermined women floating down the gangplanks. Horse racing and kinipōpō at Kapiolani Park. Open markets where a dozen different languages were heard, everywhere the make-you-drunk scent of frangipani, and orchids leaping from the mouths of freshly killed wild boar. Kachi-kachi bands played, Flips ran with jugs of pig’s blood. Handsome kānaka hawked lei of offal slung round their golden necks.
And in the “high-tone” part of town, chandeliered windows of three-storied homes with wraparound lānai, dwellings of merchant princes, sugar millionaires, where waltzes were played on grand pianos. Eventually, Pono found the sprawling white Coenradsten house, now owned by Boston people.
Miko stared, her mouth open. “You no lie?”
“No lie.” Pono said. “My great-grandfather owned. Once very rich.”
“Why you no live dere now?”
Pono thought a while. “If I live there, I not meet you and Run Run.” Snarling watchdogs threw themselves against the fence, trained to hate the smell of natives.
For a year Pono tried to talk Miko out of street work, but she had grown dependent on the life.
“Bettah den da cannery! Beside, in da dark, sailah make me feel beautiful.” One day she brought home a new dress and a large box of candy. “Dis sailah want live wif me. What you t’ink, Pono?”
Something in her turned over, but her voice was calm. “Make him find you house with separate room for Run Run. So she not have to grow up face da wall.”
That night while Miko worked the streets, Pono held the little girl, heart-broken. “You like one home, and Papa?”
“Sure!” Run Run cried. “I like go school now. I one smart keed!”
Three weeks later, Miko took Run Run and moved in with her sailor. “Find one rich man,” she yelled back. “Now da time, while you still plenny pretty!”
Pono sat in the empty room, holding a skinning knife to her throat. What happened to my dream? That Run Run and I would grow old together, dancing in showers of cinnamon. She was just fifteen, and life had gifted her again with emptiness. Pressing the knife against her neck, she began the sad, raspy transaction of blade through flesh.
Suddenly her room began to tremble, the mirror turned sideways on the wall. Outside, the pounding of hundreds of feet made the street quake so tenements shook and swayed. She heard distant screams coming closer, like voices in an Oriental dream. Pono ran to the window, saw crowds of ragged Japanese fleeing armed, club-wielding police. Organized strikers from plantations outside the city, thousands of them were hiding in Chinatown. Now, routed from Buddhist temples and sake breweries, they were running for their lives.
Below her window, a striker tripped, went down crying out for help. She saw the swinging club, his head part like a melon.
The Portuguese policeman stood over him yelling, “Sneaky Daikon eater!” striking again and again, brains hanging pendant from his club.
Staring down at the shrieking mob, she felt a white furnace explode within her—remembering a sheriffs posse, her family roped like cattle. Now, Pono focused so intently on the policeman, he looked up at her and grinned. She held the look, whispering over and over while the man wiped his dripping club. Within a month, coins of dead white spots would cover his legs. His eyelids would begin to rot. By the time he was caged on the leper ship bound for Kalaupapa, his family would have wiped his name from their genealogy.
Thirty Japanese were murdered that day, remembered as the Strikers’ Massacre. Witnessing the slaughter, so close she smelled the blood, Pono forgot to die. She forgot to do everything but hate.
Nā Ho’okuano’o Manō
* * *
Shark Meditations
FOR MONTHS SHE DREAMED. Even on her feet at the cannery, she dreamed. A giant in a cape of rain riding a corpse across the ocean’s skin. A face taking shape inside a wave, teeth gnashing a squid to death with a fierce bite behind the eyes. Had she not been so lonely, so bereft, Pono might have read the dreams and followed them. She might not have been drawn to Valentine Keaka Kumu.
One day, watching inter-island steamers dock in Honolulu’s port, she saw men unlike any she had seen before. Wearing sombreros of woven pandanus, they were decked with lei of fresh flowers, bright, red sashes round their waists. Over white pants, high leather leggings served as sheaths for long knives glinting in the sun. Lariats hung from their saddles and, while their horses danced down the gangplank, their spurs made loud, jingling sounds. As crowds gathered dockside, a handsome rider’s eyes snagged on Pono. Impulsively, he flung her a lei.
“Paniolo from da Big Island,” someone said. “Here for exhibition rodeo.”
From the boats’ hold, she could hear the uneasy bellowing of cattle.
Years earlier, searching for work, Hawaiians had left their ‘ohana, headed for upcountry cattle ranches on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. There for decades, longhorn cattle had run wild, eating up forests, trampling taro patches of local farmers. These fast multiplying brutes were descendants of longhorns brought from California in the late 1700s as a gift for King Kamehameha.
In the nineteenth century, one of Hawai‘i’s kings had imported Spanish and Mexic
an cowboys to teach natives how to ride and rope, slaughter, and prepare hides for shipment. They had brought with them high-horned saddles, long spurs and braided lassos. Hawaiians liked their buckaroo style, and soon became real paniolo, island version of the galloping españoles. Now, the prime minister of England, visiting Honolulu, wanted to see cowboys trained by the famous Spaniards.
That night, Pono brushed her long black hair until it shone, then dressed carefully in a white holokū that made her skin stand out. She looked one last time round her room. She would not return. Then, wearing the lei from the handsome paniolo, she headed for Kapiolani Park, where a huge tent had been set up for the rodeo honoring England’s visiting PM.
Using all of her cannery wages, she bought a seat near the front of the grandstands, beside the prime minister’s party. It was a huge crowd of several thousand, the haole elite, as well as locals and immigrants: anyone who loved horses and rodeos. Inside, an almost circus atmosphere prevailed, smell of sawdust and nervous animals, horse manure and beer, “shave ice” flavored with coconut juice, and something new called “hot dogs.” Clowns turned hurdy-gurdies, while painted midgets cartwheeled by, and strolling Hawaiians played ‘ukulele, guitars, mandolins.
From the moment of the Grand Entry—dashing paniolo on handsome steeds holding flags of Hawai‘i, the United States and Great Britain—Pono watched for the man she would marry. Each time he pranced by, she stood up tall, wearing his lei, her eyes burning into his shoulders. In the myriad colors of spectators, her pure white dress was a beacon; a light seemed to engulf her, lifting her from the crowd. She was so handsome, so proud, people turned and stared. Paniolo passing tipped their hats. Touching the lei at her shoulders, Pono responded only to the one she had chosen.
After preliminary calf roping and steer throwing, barrel racing, and “snubbing,” a man appeared on the back of a ferocious bronco that threw him into the stands. Pono covered her eyes, and someone touched her arm.
“No worry. That one not your sweetheart!”
Then a man seemed hurled out of a pen, riding one-handed a writhing 1,500-pound bull. Pono recognized him, horrified, as he bounced and flipped, grinning crazily. He stayed on for twelve seconds, a record, and the crowd stood and roared his name. “Valentine . . . Valentine!”
He struggled to his feet, laughing, dusted off his chaps and, approaching the stands, threw his hat to Pono. The crowd cheered, strolling musicians struck up a haunting, old Hawaiian song, “Wahine U‘i, Beautiful Woman.” She stood holding his hat to her chest, while paniolo—ragged, bloodied and bandaged—rode gallantly in formation for the Grand Finale. She stood with his hat until grandstands were empty, no one left but old men sweeping sawdust.
As if summoned, Valentine limped back into the ring, looked up at her and smiled. “What now, Wahine U‘i?”
In one week they were married, spending their honeymoon on the steamer headed for the Big Island. During the night while her husband slept, his skin tatooed with her virgin blood, Pono crept up on deck, feeling her life slide into a new phase, feeling breathless, as if God were standing beside her, and somewhat terrified, as if he were about to lean over and bite off a hunk of her cheek.
Here on the Big Island, on cool slopes stretching down the flanks of the long-extinct volcano, Mauna Kea, Kamuela was a small cowboy town along the Mamalahoa Highway. Here, modest wooden houses of paniolo stood weathered but spotlessly clean, aired by winds sweeping across rich, upcountry grazelands, bringing the scent of cattle and rich soil, smell of salt and brine from the sea. Canned orchids and bougainvillea lined rickety steps of each house. Fishing nets were thrown across tiny lawns, and toed rubber tabis danced from clotheslines like large black feet.
Somedays, waiting for her husband, Pono sat on her little porch, and felt she was sitting atop the world. Mauna Kea rose almost fourteen thousand feet, its volcanic crown blanketed in snow in winter. And far south, Mauna Loa, a sister volcano, and beyond that Kīlauea Crater, the one that never slept. Every now and then Kīlauea blew its top, spouting fire thousands of feet in the air. It was a vastly rich island, for beside the great cattle ranches of hundreds of thousands of acres, down-country were sugar plantations, macadamia nut farms, coffee and orchid farms.
Sometimes wives talked of haunted places, ancient burial shrines that moved, and the dreaded “Night Marchers,” Kamehameha’s warrior-ghosts who haunted scenes of their great battles.
“I have seen them,” Pono said. “Shadows crossing the land.”
“Where have you seen them?” women asked.
“I dream.”
At first they were skeptical, but one by one, they came with gifts, bowls of poi, a chicken. “Is my husband faithful? Will my boy go to university? Will my next child be a girl?” Sometimes she dream-told for them, and sometimes, seeing tragedy, she would not.
She was fond of her husband, Valentine, humoring him like a child, knowing in her heart this was not a great love. He was handsome, fearless in the saddle, but when his feet were on the ground, he was just a cowhand, an overgrown boy with no concept of her dreams, her intuition. All he could offer were rodeos and love songs, and all he asked of her were meals and the animal comfort of her body, making him feel a man.
What Pono missed was what her parents had shared, blind devotion that would drive a woman to swing a machete at a deputy. Or even the almost carnal passion Silvio had possessed for his Generalito, embracing the bird, sucking its ragged head into his mouth, his whole life focused on three pounds of feathers. Yet, all she could summon for Valentine was a motherly feeling, a lack of malice. She carried with her now, like added weight, an odor of resignation.
When she’d been married a year she and other wives waved goodbye to their husbands who were bound for Honolulu, an exhibition roundup for Australian cattlemen. For weeks they’d practiced, wanting to show the Aussies how steers from each island were boarded on steamers bound for Honolulu and the slaughterhouses.
The big ship would anchor in a bay. Then mounted paniolo would rope steer by the horns with spinning lariats, and jockey them into the surf. Dodging sharks, they passed the ropes to sailors in whaleboats anchored just beyond shallow water so steers couldn’t get their footing and tear free. When eight steers were tied up on each side by their horns, the boats would be rowed out to the big ship where cattle were lifted aboard by winches. Whaleboats then returned for more steers.
Paniolo worked in pairs, wet shoulders and thighs bulging and glistening, salt-stained horses rearing, shooting out of the waves like dark gods. Sometimes crowds gathered, placing bets on how many steers would be taken by sharks before they reached the mother ship. Afterwards, men spilled off their horses, pulled off the saddles, and collapsed on the beach. Sun caught the sand on their dark bodies so they seemed covered with granulated diamonds. And in the surf, horses freed from their saddles lifted their heads majestically, manes and tails shooting plumes like creatures from mythology. Pono would remember such days, so wondrous they left a glare.
After their men left for Honolulu, wives sat around complaining of their drinking habits, dirt-encrusted clothes, addiction to horses and rodeos that brought in belt buckles and trophies, but no real income. One night Pono dreamed of Valentine craning his neck at tall buildings called “skyscrapers.” The next night she saw him galloping down boulevards, between motorcars and buses, men with machine guns pursuing him. He tossed them a big black ball, and they slowed, marveling at the thing. Then one of them lifted his arm and shot.
Three weeks later, all but two of the paniolo came home to the Big Island. Valentine and another cowboy, drunk on ‘ōkolehao, had stowed away on the Lurline bound for San Francisco. Pono sat, waiting for word. One night she opened the small leather pouch kept under her mattress. One of her black pearls was gone. Weeks later, the FBI brought Valentine’s sidekick home to Honolulu.
From San Francisco, they had hitchhiked all the way to Chicago for the annual International Rodeo, biggest in the world. Illegal aliens, they couldn
’t work the rodeo without working papers and a license. Valentine tried unsuccessfully to bribe officials with a huge black South Seas pearl. Intrigued by the rumored size of the gem, large and perfect as a grape, gangsters made Valentine an offer. When he demanded more money, the mob gunned him down, wrenching the pearl from his pocket as he died. Witnessing the slaying, his paniolo sidekick turned himself in, begging to be sent home to Hawai‘i.
The ranch owner’s wife offered Pono work as her housemaid, and three paniolo immediately proposed marriage; she looked at them all and laughed. It was time to know this island. Time to wander and look, and see. There were things she had heard of here that she would only believe with her eyes: mysterious Waipi‘o Valley on the northeast coast where in deep rain forests Menehune lived. Great soaring cliffs with thousand-foot waterfalls. Glittering lava beaches like acres of black diamonds, and valleys where orchids bloomed for miles. Coffee mountains of fragrant snow. A town of a thousand rainbows. A beach that burped precious jewels washed in from the Orient.
Then, there was the forbidding country of the southeast coast, one of bubbling steam vents and sulfuric fumes, where earth was covered with ‘ā‘ā and pāhoehoe. Volcano country, where Pele, Goddess of Fire, lived deep in the pit called Halemaumau. Now and then, she showed her anger by rending the earth so it belched molten lava, creating a moonscape of desolation.
It was not just curiosity that drove her. Pono felt she had been called to this island of so many moods and geographies. Week after week, by foot and on mule, she struggled through lush valleys and barren brushland, bartering her dreams for food. Some nights she slept on hay with sheep and cattle. Some days, exhausted, she made her way down jagged rocks and floated in the sea. After years of living inland, she began to understand that water was her natural element, entering her like a drug. When motion and colors of the land exhausted her, when she saw how she stood apart from ordinary people, the sea was what she now turned to.
Shark Dialogues Page 12