She imagines faces shining in the coffee trees again, brown bodies bending in the fields, Tang Pin overseeing them. Approaching, she sees the jungle canopy of neglected, overgrown trees, workers’ shacks deserted. A fading yellow sign blocks the driveway.
QUARANTINE NOTICE . . . THIS HOUSE HAS A COMMUNICABLE
DISEASE, LEPROSY, AND IS SUBJECT TO FUMIGATION
Shutters bang, droppings from wild peacocks litter the lānai. Then a figure on the lawn. Tang Pin and his half-mad wife and their young son are living in one of the shacks.
He hugs Pono and her infant. “You come live wit’ us. We wait for Duke come home.”
He takes her and the infant in, but his wife runs screaming from their shack. A small crowd surges up the road behind her, cursing Pono. “Filth! Filth! You put da curse on Duke. Kahuna!” Pitching rocks at her and her tainted child, they drive her from Captain Cook town. Tang Pin presses money and her old leather pouch upon her. She runs. For weeks she runs, foraging, begging, moving farther across the island.
Each night lying in fields, she inspects the infant, searching its skin for telltale signs, small suppurations. Her face grows gaunt as a gypsy’s, her body becomes severe, bony, built for speed. Only her breasts stay full, the big-eyed infant sucking fast, alert to what this body will give, what hold back. She is named Holo, to run, for her life has begun in flight. She will grow into a quiet child, an air of absent-mindedness, of degenerate innocence. She will witness slaughter.
In slow progress, Pono traveled southeast, then north, coming to rest on the Hamakua Coast far from anything she knew. She found work on a sugar plantation as scrub maid for the Portuguese luna and his frail, childless wife. Pono was housed in a shack of rotting wood alive with centipedes and roaches, the planks so wide her child was bathed in subdued, vermilion shafts of dusk. At night Pono could see the stars, whole constellations, while cane dust blown in by the trades settled on her lips. A basin, a cot, a door loose on its hinges. In sleep, she encircled the child, circling memories engraved on her bones. She gnawed them, buried, unearthed them, gnawed again.
Bounty hunters dragging them handcuffed to a boat, the boat transporting them to Honolulu, Kalihi Receiving Station, where lepers were isolated, probed, diagnosed. Doctors staring at Duke’s nakedness, his lesions vivid and alive. Experts discussing how beautiful the disease was under microscope—red bacteria invading blue nerve tissue.
And in another room, Pono stripped, spun slowly on a revolving platform. Confusion in the eyes of doctors when they cannot find a sore. She had lived with the leper a year, they had been lovers. Pono imprisoned in the women’s isolation ward, waiting for lesions to appear. One day she and Duke face each other ten feet apart, wire mesh and guards between them.
“Beloved, I go tomorrow,” he said. “I will die there, with the bones of my family at Kalaupapa.”
Her screams.
And tearing all night at a window screen, wedging her body out. Climbing a barbed-wire fence at dawn. And running down the docks toward braying lepers in cages on a barge. And Duke caged alone because of his massive size and strength. Guards pointing at the cages. “Apes in a zoo.”
Her screams.
Trying to fling herself down the gangplank, onto the barge. Seeing her struggling dockside, Duke’s lips forming her name as strong arms detained her. And then she saw the kneeling crowds, heard them wail his name. And she knelt, too, suddenly gasping, something quickening inside her. If he was gone, then she would run, live like an animal. They would not take from her his seed.
Backing up slowly on her knees, Pono melted into crowds, into fields, as Duke’s ship winked on the horizon. And she ran, tiptoed along the edges of humanity, hellish months of hiding, scavenging alone, then stowing away on a boat back to the Big Island, back to jungles she understood. Growing big, clumsy, slow, eating only wild mango and banana as her stomach stretched into a brown transparency.
Some nights now, swaddling the child in the tiny shack on the Hamakua Coast, she heard the sweet, soft sounds of ‘ukulele, mandolin, workers in their boxlike wooden shacks, singing old Hawaiian songs. She thought of Duke and the jungle, months of extreme terror, and laughter, exhilaration, remembering him in detail, every gesture, every word, remembering as if she were dying. And she was struck with astonishment that that had been their happiest time.
Sometimes, hearing laughter in the dusk, sounds of people of shared blood, sharing meals, she thought of red pine fields of her youth, her mother’s laughter. At Kalihi Receiving Station, she had given her family name, Meahuna. Searching for her, by now police would have found her family outside Honolulu. Hearing Pono was tainted with ma ‘i Pākē, they would have erased from their genealogy the name of this girl they had long ago abandoned. Some nights she thought of strangling her child, of flinging herself into the sea, back into the world of manō. Then, she thought of the man she loved, whose nerve ends were dying, who was slowly losing touch with objects, with his own skin. If death would spare him, she would be his nerve ends; she would be his skin.
These were her vows at eighteen: Dare everything. Find him.
She labored in the luna’s house, laundering, scrubbing floors, scrubbing footprints of a man whose glances pawed her hips. His name was Calcados, his pale Portuguese face boyish, teeth bucked, beavery like a child’s. But his body was big and muscled, his movements like rage unraveling as he cracked a snakeskin whip that seemed to grow out of his fist. The first time he saw Pono he stood very still.
Because she was aloof and strange, house servants treated her as strange, and because she kept her mind invisible the luna’s wife said she was cold. Yet, in the “dirty kitchen,” where pau hana field hands ate, Pono sat comfortable midst smells of Chinese parsley, grease and ginger, eating riceballs, bowls of eel and cuttlefish with her fingers. On cool winter nights, while the wood stove glowed, she began to prescribe for workers, talking in heavy Pidgin.
Rolling cure-leaves into powder, she gave them a ‘ali‘i tea for sleep, ‘awa tea for heartache, strong green China tea for health. And spoonfuls of nutmeg that kept them high and numb during killing hours in the fields. And, slowly, she began to dream for them, foreseeing futures. They saw she was kahuna, and whispered of blue spirits whisking round her shack at night, of seeing Pono float above the cane. Her child, Holo, was possessed, they said, and sometimes ran the fields transformed into a mongoose, a strawberry rat.
She soothed them with old Hawaiian legends, melting myths into their rum, into their little balls of Dragon Seed.
“Soah my body,” they complained. “Pau good health. Lungs red dust, gone pilau!”
For they were pushed brutally all day, swinging razor-sharp machetes, sometimes taking a finger, part of a leg. In cane up to twelve feet tall, it was just workers and knives, no machines to cut or gather. Women did the weeding, planting, men the burning, slashing. And they began at dawn, scorched, half-blinded by the sun at noon, a thirty-minute break to squat, brood over rice-bun lunches, then slashing, burning, gathering again, on into dusk, into past-pain time when they were rendered senseless. They wore masks like bandits against red dirt that clogged the nose, and cane dust that scarred the lungs. They wore hats, gloves, boots, woven-fiber leg armor, even goggles. Still they died: exhaustion, infection, dehydration, sometimes so blistered and bubbled and crippled, they plunged over cliffs welcoming jagged rocks below.
The luna pushed them, pressured by the manager, the manager in turn pressured by plantation owners, rich, missionary descendants. After twelve and fifteen hours of scorching stoop work, paid only forty cents a day, workers would return to shacks housing eight to twenty people, bachelors squeezed thirty to forty in a bunkhouse. No indoor toilets, no running water, no sick leave, or rest, they were reservoirs of slaves.
Pono remembered the story her mother had told of her father, murdered while fighting for workers’ rights early in the century. In twenty-five years, what progress had been made? Sometimes at night she heard exhausted husbands and
wives holding each other, unable to cry, unable to stop. When workers banded, asking for medical care, toilets, decent food, foremen beat them, fired them, had them arrested on trumped-up charges.
Chinese had left plantations as soon as their contracts expired, opening small businesses in the towns. Most plantation workers were now Japanese, Filipino, Koreans, Puerto Ricans, with a growing reputation as trouble-makers, strikers. In 1924, three thousand Filipinos on Kaua‘i had marched in a strike; sixteen were shot dead with machine guns by the National Guard. Now, on every island, plantation workers were organizing. There were rumblings along the Hamakua Coast, strikers dragged from their beds and shot.
One day a car drove up the road, a sheriff stepped out, and two Japanese workers were handcuffed and taken away as agitators, arrested on charges of holding up a store. The luna, Calcados, called workers from their shacks, a crowd of several hundred. Standing over them, he caressed his rolled-up snake whip, his voice loud, but not unkind.
“I don’t make the rules. They’re handed down to me.” He raised the whip. “You never seen this used on humans, eh? Only on stubborn mules.”
Reluctantly, they nodded, remembering mules pissing in terror at the sight of the whip. A Filipino stepped forward, asked why Calcados wouldn’t pass lists of their demands on to his superiors.
“You’ll lose your jobs, is why. They’ll trump up crimes, imprison or shoot you. Your children will starve.”
Weeks later, another car pulled up. From the kitchen, Pono saw two big Hawaiians emerge wearing holstered guns. Who would they arrest today? she wondered. Who has been agitating? Then one of them pronounced a word that dropped her to her knees. She felt her insides glow. Ma‘i Pākē. They roamed up and down the rows of shacks, dragging people out at random. A schoolteacher had reported a suspicious-looking child. Mothers screamed, hiding their children under beds, but two boys were found with red spots on their legs. Their families were handcuffed, forced out to the car.
Seeing Pono in the distance, one of the bounty hunters approached slowly, studying her arms and neck. Her dark, golden skin was smooth, no swelling, or lesions. She was tall as a man, so beautiful and brimming with health, the bounty hunter dropped his eyes.
“How long you worked here?”
Pono flung her head back, her tongue went hard. She stood arrogant and dumb.
Calcados approached. “What you want with her?”
“Look like someone on our list,” the bounty man said. “Runaway from Kalihi Receiving Hospital. Oh, ‘bout one year ago. Big wahine. Lived with one rich leper, Duke Kealoha, from over Kona side.”
Calcados studied her, faced the bounty man and lied. “She’s been with us a couple years. Husband works down Hilo way. This ain’t the one you want.”
That night she sat in darkness, wondering Why? What is his motive? Where is the trap? Now she was rigidly alert, eeling away from Calcados’s gaze. At dusk, when workers straggled in from the fields, she could lift his smell from other men. Sometimes he came and stood close enough for her to see on his massive arms, thick hair curly with sweat.
They would have their history, she knew it, and prepared herself, little tributaries of hate filling the basin of her brain. One night she dreamed of him, his massive arms encircling, obliterating her. She sat up instantly awake, saw him through her rotten walls, moonlight on his jaw. Dreamily, he leaned against her shack, looking at the sky. He lit his pipe and sighed. She understood then that he wouldn’t come by force, he wanted her to want him.
Desperation was raw material for drastic change. Pono whacked off her dark, cascading hair, sheared it so close to the scalp, she was bald in patches. She let the child be sick on her and didn’t wash, wore greasy worker’s pants, bound her large breasts so they went flat. Still, he came at night, leaned against her shack, and waited.
Then Pono did a desperate thing. She slept in excrement. Field-workers thought she’d lost her mind. The cook cursed her, made her bathe in harsh soap each day before entering the big house. Yet every night before she slept, Pono caked her feet in manure from livestock, surrounding her shack with sewage smells, keeping him away. Calcados watched, half amused, and bided his time.
When Holo was two, the luna’s wife delivered their second stillborn. Calcados stood at the tiny graves, puffing his pipe. A week later he marched two field hands into the bush at gunpoint, marched them until the ground beneath them gurgled. One mimiki, quicksand. They had slain one of his horses, sold the flesh for food. They seemed to last all night, sucked slowly down, the darkness swallowed by their screams. Near dawn, Calcados aimed his rifle at a solitary arm still protruding from the sand, knocking off the fingers one by one. In grief, their families beat their heads against the ground.
One day, returning from the beach with Holo, Pono saw her shack on fire and ran inside, grabbing up her meager things. People gathered, watching as the thing burned to the ground.
“Moah bettah,” someone said. “Place smell terrible, like sheet!”
He moved her to a better shack, a real bed not a cot, a bed for little Holo, walls through which cane dust didn’t penetrate. He forbade her shears, so that her hair began to grow. People watched. The whole plantation seemed to hold its breath. One night Pono took her child and started running. Calcados caught up with her on horseback, lassoing her like a steer.
Dismounting, he approached, speaking softly. “If you leave again, I’ll give you to the bounty hunters. I’ll take your daughter, give her to my childless wife.”
Terrified, she sat on beaches, calling out Duke’s name. Two years . . . Beloved, are you still alive? No word from him. No way to get word to him. Each night she still examined herself and Holo for red spots, sly white patches of ma‘i Pākē. They were cursed with perfect health.
On her twentieth birthday, Pono repeated her vow: Dare everything. Find him. But how? She did not have the clues.
Cane-burning season began, the air filled with black smoke, sky blistered a vicious red as fires burned off leaves of ripe sugarcane, leaving sappy stalks ready for harvesting. Day and night, silhouettes of workers masked like bandits moved through fields, black figures chasing torches. They staggered back to camp in relays—smoky, singed couples sticking together like taffy. They fell asleep parched with the heavy smell of braised sugar and burnt human hair. From the big house, Calcados’s wife watched them at all hours, a woman left alone.
One night Pono was awakened by hot, caramel wind. Her door was open, his shoulders lit by fires in the field behind him. She stared, tense spasm of concentration. Is this a dream? Then he moved toward her in sordid actuality, smell of smoke and human sweat, of scorched fingernails. His shirt was tattered from burning cane, he pulled it off in rags. She sat up slowly, feeling her mouth lichen over, her tongue go slick with fur.
“Now,” he said. A single word, a shot bolt.
“Never!” she cried.
He didn’t know she would be so strong. She was on him like a glare, punching, smothering, her loamy, sweet smell instantly metallic. He fell back, fighting for balance and, naked, she grabbed the sleeping child and ran. His hand reached out, grabbing her hair so she surged backwards like a tethered horse. They seemed to go down in slow motion, the sleeping child between them. She flung Holo back into her bed while his arm encircled Pono’s neck, and silently they struggled, dancers searching for a theme. Calcados tightened his grip, his muscles closing down her windpipe, but somehow she turned, teeth glistening with venom, in her eyes intent to mutilate. And in that look he understood what they were struggling for had little to do with passion. Now, he was fighting for his life. She brought up her knee between his legs; he folded in a vision of bright, liturgical colors.
Pono rolled into a corner, came up squatting, a knife glittering in her hand. He staggered to his feet, shook his head, pulled off his belt rattling through its loops. If he could not have her, he’d whip her to death. Still they were silent, grappling in grunts while the bed was thrown, the tub knocked on its side.
And he came at her, belt buckle crackling against her hip, the impact echoing in her brain. She leapt, took part of his earlobe with the knife, then scored him deeply in the neck.
As in a dream, the child heard the belt whistling through the air and sang out softly in her sleep. The buckle biting again and again into her mother’s flesh, the mother shuddering to her knees. Pono went down with nothing left. His raucous panting then, his lips sucking her whorled crenellations of nipples. His face in her hair, asking unspeakable things, that she fuck him. That she love him. Even at the edge of consciousness, her fists still pounded, legs flailed the air, her brain so full of hate, at first she did not understand he was in her, she was full of him. Even then, she struggled, trying to kill him, her movements engorging him, driving him deeper. Her sounds became bleak, sacrificial.
She never screamed, even as his weight ground her against the wooden floor. His mouth on her so she couldn’t breathe. His pale, hairy body surrounding her, her coffin. Outside, fiery cane fields kept bursting, and she did not hear. Shadows of flames played on her walls, she did not see. He plunged so deep, so hard, she felt something crack. Something within broke down, forever.
His ear was running blood, dripping on her breasts, his neck open, one eye swelling shut. His hair was singed and standing out. And he was inexhaustible. He took her buttocks in his hands, lifting her whole pelvis so she was forced to watch his pace. Wind shifted, and in the fields, black figures moved with pitchforks. The fires leaned, sparks danced on her roof, ran down her mouth and turned her tongue to dust.
Let me. 0, let me die.
Beginning to shudder violently, Calcados grabbed her arms, wrapping them round his neck. Then he seemed to hunker down, teeth bared, breathing so hard she thought, Yes, he will kill me. He will consume my flesh. His body snapped, eyes blank, searching hers in wonder, and when he came, he dropped his head between her breasts and wept. Hours passed, time the only witness to him taking her again, turning her like something on a spit. Crying low and deep inside, Pono felt life running from her eyes.
Shark Dialogues Page 15