Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  “Mama! What do you see?”

  “An old dream. I saw it when that President Roosevelt came to Honolulu.” Exploding ships, running men on fire. Oil bubbling in tides.

  She woke at dawn that Sunday, smell of burning flesh high in her nostrils. Wrapping the still-sleeping girls in blankets, she stole a neighbor’s car and drove insanely, away from Kalihi, from the harbor of Pearl River. Following a red dirt road, she found her way to a deserted cove and just before eight o’clock, pushed her daughters into the sea.

  “Swim!”

  She did not know where they should swim to. She only knew they had to get away from land. Minutes later, she heard the planes, saw them approaching in formation.

  “Dive!”

  Like little seals, they dove, following their mother underwater. Surfacing only for air, she led them out toward the reef where it was deep and dangerous, knowing that beyond the reef was where their ‘aumākua slept, and if they were going to die it should be in ancestral precincts. They dove again, this time so deep, they saw the ocean floor roll up like a carpet, saw the reef tremble like a building giving warning. She dragged them up again for air, let them take it in in gulps, then pulled them down again.

  Down down where life was rhythmed by reflex she held her fingers out and they clasped hands floating in a circle squinting like embryos dreamily acknowledging each other in a giant womb and in that float-ingtime a timeless time none of them hurt no one was damaged or frightened or alone they were just cells connected by a stroke of light by touch Pono holding Mina’s hand and Mina holding Emma’s and Emma grasping Edita’s and her grasping Holo and they blended like the elements of color elements that somewhere in the grid of time would recede and rinse away and in this moment in this motherwomb flesh tendered watery and wrinkled so they looked wise they heard the clicking of the reef billions of cells building microscopic civilizations in its branches civilizations that would perish and be built again in time and perish and each of them even Mina the youngest seemed to smile understanding that things are as they are that things can be no other way they would never find that peace again not one of them they would never be that safe.

  The ocean heaved again, raining down debris. Something human rippled the surface of their skin. They listened. Miles away in watery tombs, men screamed. At first the sounds were distant, then the ocean washed them near, and it was awful. The girls moved closer, frightened. Bursting for air, Pono dragged them to the surface, then dove again. And listened. Screams embalmed in sunken ships that would go on for days, and weeks, screams that would slowly fade to bleats, to nothing.

  She shot to the surface and saw, far down the coast, the inferno of Pearl Harbor, huge flashes, devastating fireballs shooting up hundreds of feet, mushrooms of smoke boiling skyward. All the ocean seemed on fire, black drapes slowly drawn across exploding skies. Water around her daughters’ shoulders spit and splattered and looking up, Pono saw two planes zigzagging in a deadly dogfight. One of them tumbled over and crashed out past the reef. Confused, terrified, she dragged the girls out of the water, heading straight at the oncoming plane. Nosing down in front of them, it dipped its wings, rising red sun on its fuselage. The pilot came so close, Pono saw him smile. He even waved.

  She gathered the girls, pushing and shoving them up the beach into

  thick bushes. While they snuffled and screamed as if trying to climb inside her ribs, she squatted, hugging them to her, all of them, shielding them with her head and arms. Then, she closed her eyes. And saw.

  A mama-san watering her plants looks up, sees spitfiring planes, and dies, blood sprinkling her orchids. A family in a car instantly incinerated. A child exploding in its mother’s arms. Burning buildings, people leaping to their death. Charred corpses in a tofu factory. A saimin stand airborne, noodles raining down with limbs of seven high school athletes. A young boxer buried in the wreckage of a gym, his arms intact, legs never to be found. Bombed, machine gun strafed, shrapnel lodged in necks and hearts. A world of human jams and jellies. And in Pearl Harbor, battleships half submerged, pointing at the sky like smoldering fingers. And sailors, young sailors floating in their quiet tides.

  She opened her eyes, saw more planes knock each other from the sky. In the hills behind her, an aerial torpedo hit a U.S. Air Force hangar holding a million rounds of machine gun ammunition. The earth shuddered and seemed to break in pieces. Somehow she crawled her daughters to the car, piling them in blankets on the floor. Then she accelerated up the highway, skidding like a madwoman. On the radio a fading voice, “McCoy . . . the real McCoy . . .” Wail of sirens, cars spinning, slamming into each other, humans in utter shock, not knowing where to hide.

  A man waved from an ambulance, engine perforated with bomb splinters. “Queens Hospital. Need blood real bad!”

  Hours later, Pono pushed her way inside the hospital. Corridors of flowing blood. Burn cases, mutilations in the thousands. A man squatted in a corner, cradling a human head like a dark cabbage. He cried out, begging someone to find the rest of his wife’s body. Orderlies ran by ripping up hospital gowns for bandages. Surgeons, wearing rags across their mouths, operated in their underwear.

  A nurse passed, carrying an amputation saw, eyes dead, her voice mechanical. “There is no more anesthesia.” And everywhere, footprints and fingerprints in red.

  By then, over a thousand civilians had lined up donating blood. Pono stood in line ten hours just to give one pint. Japanese arrived, offering blood, and money, each family dressed in black, the color worn when respect is due. A blind Hawaiian couple gave two pints, then stood in line to give again. In hospitals round the island, immigrant workers arrived, donating Chinese blood, and Filipino, blood of Puerto Rican and Korean. They came straight from their jobs, leaving donor beds stained with tractor oil, rust of machetes, filthy dust of sugarcane, red dirt of pine fields. They came, and they were welcomed.

  Diplomats, rich haole corporate men and planters stood in line with cannery women, salesclerks, and servants. They wept openly, and held each other. Grief, the need to give. A pint of female blood contained more plasma than a man’s. Word went out and women swarmed from every strata. High-born matrons, debutantes, waterfront prostitutes still wearing cheongsams Pono had made for them.

  For days and weeks they volunteered, washing out bandages and tubing, throwing out body parts, painting “T” on foreheads of the wounded who received tetanus shots. Solemnly they folded uniforms of the dead, firemen, and policemen, men of the armed forces. They shared food and funeral clothes, hung denim blackout curtains for their neighbors, and painted over headlights of their cars. And for a time people drew together, forgetting race, religion, thinking only of each other and their precious islands. They would never be as vulnerable again, nor would they ever be as kind.

  Not Mother Tongue

  * * *

  A WOMAN IN AN ALLEY near the waterfront. Pitch of nightly blackouts so complete she knows black marketeers only by their breath, the smell of Lucky Strikes. Transactions of the blind encoded by the senses. Her dollars slide across a calloused palm. He counts by feel the bills, places in her hand good-for-your-daughters nourishment, rusty blood-smell of something freshly killed—beef wrapped in ink-smelling newsprint. And then another weight, another packet, bitter-pungent smell that makes her sway, makes her mouth water, roasted beans of real kine coffee. Somewhere a skidding tire, shouts of military cops, more “Jap spies” taken for custodial detention. And she is running, a woman with a rubber face slung across her back.

  They would be remembered as the gas-mask years. Government-issue worn by everyone, women, even infants. Rivers of cannery workers ebbing and flowing with rubber humpbacks. Some wore them hanging at their chests, like freak infants nursing. Even weddings: portraits of brides posed with gas masks tucked behind white gowns. And all the other accoutrements of war—martial law, curfews, fingerprinting, air raids, midnight arrests. Beaches barbed-wired, U.S. Army tanks surrounding ‘Iolani Palace.

  Japanese we
re spat upon, fired from their jobs. FBI teams arrived at midnight, took handcuffed neighbors off in trucks. At Sand Island Detention Center Japanese lived behind barbed wire in little tents, guarded round the clock. Some people hanged themselves in shame. A “Nip” caught with a shortwave radio in his orchid house was shot running down King Street in his pajamas.

  Sugar and pineapple production were stepped up in those years, considered essential crops. After double shifts at the cannery, Pono swallowed nutmeg for false energy and labored as a volunteer, helped build air raid shelters, dig trenches in zigzag patterns to minimize casualties if bombs fell again. On weekends she helped inoculate hundreds of thousands against typhoid, diphtheria, smallpox, in case of epidemics. She made wreaths for graves of the dead.

  She bought war bonds. And in return, a Red Cross supervisor let her make one phone call a month to Kalaupapa Missionary Hospital on Moloka‘i. Travel was impossible. Japanese subs were shelling the outer islands. A U.S. naval station had been established “Topside” on Moloka‘i, and patients down at Kalaupapa did their part, monitoring radio messages, scanning night skies for enemy bombers. Armed with nail-studded baseball bats and razor-sharp machetes, they patrolled the jungles and shoreline for infiltrators.

  “Strange,” Duke said, his voice ebbing and flowing through the ocean cables, “War has made us normal again, we feel important.”

  Watching local men go off to combat, Holo asked if her father was coming home to join them.

  “He’s already fighting somewhere,” Pono said, and in a way it was so.

  After six months, she discovered all inter-island calls were monitored by U.S. military intelligence. Everything she and Duke said had been heard by strangers; she went down on her knees, sick to her stomach. She paid two week’s salary to be smuggled into Kalaupapa on a supply boat, then had to wait three months until the boat had space. They had one night together in 1942.

  Holding each other, they talked for seven hours, while a radio played softly, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and somewhere, someone sobbing, calling out a name. They talked about the shortages of meat, and butter, how Holo and Edita wrapped bandages and strung lei for wounded soldiers coming home. She told him how many more Issei and Kibei had been deported to mainland detention camps, and Buddhist and Shinto priests. And when her time was up, the supply boat ready to depart for Honolulu, Duke held his breath, then told her in one exhalation.

  “We hear a new sulfone drug has been discovered, but precious little of it has reached us yet.”

  She grabbed him, begging. “What does it mean?”

  “. . . Maybe it will slow ma‘i Pākē, even destroy it.” It was so large a consideration, he said it casually.

  She began praying to God again, still hoping if she prayed hard enough, she might learn to believe in him.

  News came that, on the Big Island, the U.S. Army had turned the Ka‘u Desert near Kilauea Crater into a training ground. Tanks crunched across volcano beds, graves of ancient warriors were obliterated by machine gun and mortar firing. There were rumblings from Pele. Flames shot from her fire pit at night. Then word came from Tang Pin that the Army had requisitioned the farm. Soldiers were billeted all over the house.

  “One mess,” he sobbed. “Evert‘ing broken.”

  She began chanting, concentrating with all her might on each room in the house, each wall, each corridor, studying the very fibers in the wood, imagining haole soldiers with pale eyes, crude hands mauling Duke’s genealogies. Touching his books. Their bed. After weeks of chanting, concentrating, word came again from Tang Pin. Strange things were happening. A young lieutenant broke his leg, walking in his sleep. The snapshot of a sergeant’s wife wept blood. Men living in the house could not keep food down. Every night they heard a moaning, vapors clouded mirrors. After a year the Army evacuated the house, claiming it was “jinxed.”

  Pono silently rejoiced, and then she mourned. Tang Junior had enlisted, he was barely seventeen. When he was sent for basic training to Wisconsin, his father stopped eating, only a few rice grains a day, and when he was shipped out for combat in Italy, his father’s heart stopped. When she told the girls, Holo walked outside and lay down with her face against the earth.

  She had another night with Duke in spring 1943. Another, in the fall. Without visitors, patients were declining, dying of loneliness. Travel restrictions to Kalaupapa were eased somewhat but “due to the emergency,” few visiting permits were issued. She bribed supply boat skippers whenever she could afford passage.

  “You could be imprisoned,” Duke warned.

  “Small price to pay.” Her fingers walked his face, feeling the thickness of the skin, trying to imagine it. She hadn’t seen him in the light of day for three years. In the past two months he had begun the sulfone therapy. Patients were pessimistic; they had been through so many promises of cures.,

  “Is there improvement?” she asked. “Does it help?”

  “The pain is less. There’s hope.” His dignity, his quiet acceptance which wasn’t fatalism but a deep trust in life, made her feel greedy and ashamed.

  The war droned on. In the cannery lunchroom women in white caps and aprons, arms raked and raw with pineapple rash, instructed each other on how to use brass knuckles, strangulation ropes, how to garrote the enemy if he returned. Under harsh neon lights, windows hung with blackout denim, big husky Hawaiians and delicate bird-boned Chinese showed each other how to knee a man between the legs, how to eviscerate with a small paring knife, how to break a windpipe with one karate chop.

  In a corner, Japanese women sat alone, barely lifting their eyes. Sometimes, opening a lunch pail, they found live scorpions, a rat, human excrement. They never screamed, just stared, then closed their lunch pails quietly. One day a Japanese woman shoved her hand up into the pineapple slicing machine, and shoved and shoved. By the time they stopped the machine, the hand was unrecognizable, pulped flesh and crushed bones mangled past the wrist.

  She held her hand out to workers, the non-Japanese, as supervisors carried her away. ““Bettah now? Huh? Dis bettah foah you?” And then she fainted.

  The Andrew Sisters, “I’ll Get By,” the long, long nights, nights of praying, imagining Duke’s healing. Nights of laundering her daughters’ clothes, polishing their shoes. Damning them, yet proud. Honor students, each one, and someday they would go to university. She would find a way.

  One day Holo stood before her in a prom gown, gas mask slung across her shoulder, a full-blown woman at sixteen. Pono stared, amazed. She looked at the others, hardly recognizing them. She looked in a mirror, she was thirty-five.

  O Life, it was all before me. Then, somehow, it all got behind.

  Humiliations, secret abominations, motherhood, the grinding years of work, the war. She had done it all alone, for him. Who else, if not for him? His hands could disintegrate, his feet could turn to claws, his bones could crumble in her palms, and she would still desire him. He had delved deep, chosen the best of what there was in her, and drawn it to the surface. Until Duke, Pono had not known who she was, how much she could be. He had taught her the verities of living, of the heart—honor, and pity and pride, compassion, sacrifice—lacking which a human life was doomed. All she had failed in was loving her children.

  “She does things for us,” Emma said. “She must love us.”

  Edita argued with her, turning bereaved and tedious whenever she discussed her mother. “She does them with resentment, even hate.”

  Holo knew her mother best, and when she spoke they listened. “It isn’t hate. What Mama feels for us is love, but not exactly love, it’s more . . . dangerous.”

  It wasn’t something she could dredge up to the surface. When she thought of her mother, she thought of a hawk, tamed, brooding on a human wrist. After a while one forgot it was there, until you moved the wrong way, and it slashed you to pieces.

  Victories, losses, the war went on and on, the only constant, the steady drizzle of mourners up in Punchbowl Cemetery, young dead soldiers
coming home.

  She dreamed of rivers of people, flesh melting from their bones. She dreamed it again and again. At first no one understood what happened in Hiroshima. Then, Nagasaki. Pictures smuggled out appeared in local papers: leveled cities, humans cindered into dust, shadows on walls where children had evaporated. They heard rumors of starving people in those cities, drinking broth made from hearts and livers of the dead. They were eating soil. In Kalihi, Japanese couples committed suicide out of grief. Their children carried paper lanterns to the sea, and soon small ribbons of softly glowing lights floated on the tide, returning spirits of the dead to the Buddhist paradise.

  And then the war was over. It came like a silence, like held breath. First vague stupidity, disbelief. Then, jubilation. Bans were lifted, inter-island steamers sailed again. Pono felt such a fury of hope she gave off an odor of destruction. When she moved, her girls bent back like trees in hurricane.

  “It’s possible your father is finally coming home.”

  “Father.”

  A word they had always known, never felt, and so they had come to love the word because it named what was missing. Now she was threatening to fill that vacuum. They stepped back terrified, then went their quiet way, each girl trying to see herself through a father’s eyes.

  On that sulfone drug three years, ma‘i Pākē nearly arrested. So what if he’s a little scarred, a little maimed—who will notice in the crowds of wounded soldiers coming home. A life is waiting. Now his girls can honor him. And maybe, after all, they will understand me.

  The inter-island steamer plied an ocean calm as glass. And she was a woman standing alone at the railing, lips moving so rapidly people thought she was praying.

  She walked toward him down a beach, feeling herself enlarge, fattening up on courage, the will to move her feet.