Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  And I will smile. Above all else. And I will accept.

  Closing on him, she felt such terror, her shadow dropped behind her. Sun blinded her eyes, she moved by intuition. Nearing him, she heard the loud and raucous chattering of her teeth. And steeled herself, and looked.

  Jesusyoubastard, Jesusyoubastard, why?

  She had not seen him in broad daylight since 1941. She knew him only by his height. His face was the texture of boiled mud, hardened, bubbleblasted. The lips gone, as if they’d been sliced off. Scarred muscle tissues pulled all of his mouth to one side of his face. His nose bridge had finally collapsed.

  “Beloved,” he said softly. “This is what I have become.”

  He held his hands out, turning them palms up, then palms down. On one hand the fingers completely gone, the bone absorbed. A club. His arms were maps of lesion-scars, most of the muscles gone. He walked slowly, dragging one foot in a surgical boot.

  Godyoucheat. Youcheat! I raised them, kept them all together, wasn’t that enough?

  Even in prayer, somehow she had resisted God by not believing. And God had paid her back.

  She dragged her gaze across his face, picking out the good parts. His eyes still moderately clear, big, brown slanting, Polynesian eyes. And in them, deep within, a fierce, stubborn thing still ruffling its feathers, beating its wings. He was still the sum of everything that went before, of all that had made him. He was still the heart of things.

  In that moment Pono saw that they would no longer be time-bound, that they were free to live in the future, the past, in fantasy. She understood with almost static serenity, that Duke would never leave this island. Nothing could save him now—not God, not science. His flesh had outpaced the medication, the damage could not be undone.

  All those years, waiting for him to heal, to take him back into the world, she had been a woman preparing to live, not living. Now, she collapsed at his feet, mourning the not-lived years, mourning them like an orphan she must bury, and then burying them, her keening breaking the awful silence of that place. He gave her time, time to repudiate her dream, annihilate it. Gave her time to scrape around on her knees, biting up mouthfuls of sand. He gave her all the time she needed because that was what they had now. Time. Time congealed in changeless moments. Time to kill. Time that would be timeless. Even the mucus he spat up each day would quiver with time.

  Finally, he lifted her to her feet. She dropped her head against his chest, exhausted. And she saw he was still the same, in that he demanded this of her: Dignity. Slowly, tenderly, he drew her to her full height.

  “Beloved, how we walk out of this moment will determine how we remember it.”

  And she walked beside him feeling a strange and horrible happiness. For years, hope had battered at her. Like a drug, it had eaten away at her, ate her away from herself, left bone. Now, she took that bone, honing, honing, until it was sharp, a weapon. She would learn to aim it carefully. Each day would be the target. Duke took her arm, and carefully she matched his stride, and they were a couple walking the beach, struggling along in perverse magnificence.

  After long nights engaged in pathetic monologues, she decided essential cold-heartedness was what was needed to tell them.

  She gathered them together. “I’m afraid your father isn’t coming home. I’ve learned he was killed in the war. I’m sorry.” She wept, and it was easy. She was weeping for herself, not them.

  One of them screamed, maybe the youngest. Edita plucked a gecko from the wall, and almost tenderly snapped its neck. The others faded like stains. She began to hear them moving round at night. A closing and opening of doors. Too numb to care, she felt a deep despondency consume her, she seemed to function less. One night she woke, someone outside moving past her room. She saw the movement every night for weeks, and then one evening she saw Edita crawling from her window.

  She followed, not wanting to, compelled to. Neighborhoods became familiar, A‘ala Park, Hotel Street, honky-tonk bars, houses of prostitution. Through a little door, and up the stairs, raucous crowds, fiery music jumping out at her. In din and smoke, Pono stood in shock, losing Edita for a while. Smell of cheap whiskey, someone sobbing in a microphone. Couples whirling past, like people dancing mambos on a carousel. Slender men with brutal faces, tight pants, barong Tagalog shirts, slick pomaded hair. Women made up like Egyptians, pompadour hairdos, “toepinch” high heels, tight dresses following the curvature of their behinds. The smell of brilliantine and sweat, damp powder, sour armpits, the rotten fruit of stale perfumes. All the smells of desperation and cheap dance halls. The men were Filipinos. The women were anything.

  A band behind the singer, frenzied strumming of guitars, bandurias, their name emblazoned on the drums. VIBORA LUVIMINDA, the name of the Filipino labor union which had given them better wages, better lives. Many were citizens now, more assertive than the earlier generation. They laughed, joked, stared brazenly at Pono. Smoke ebbed and flowed like waves. Then she saw Edita.

  She had changed her dress, remade herself. She looked ten years older, professional and dangerous. Pono was so in shock, she didn’t move, she couldn’t. Dark, voluptuous, disturbing, Edita slid round the dance floor, moving her hips and shoulders like she was made for that music, that life. Her partner spun her out, she flung her head back like a movie star. He pulled her up against him, hard, so they seemed welded together.

  Too late, Pono thought, it is too late. She has already chosen. She pushed through dancers, struggled out to the floor, as her daughter danced groin-to-groin with this man, pelvises grinding, heads thrown back ecstatically. Pono was the tallest, the biggest person in that room. She lunged forward, picked her daughter up by her hair, held her high in the air like dead game. People screamed. The dance partner, small and wiry, seemed to be climbing Pono’s shoulder.

  She threw him off, screaming, “You pilau little Flip.”

  Music stopped, people froze. An odor permeated the crowd, the smell of hate collecting round her. Edita whinnied, sobbing at her feet where Pono dropped her. Her dance partner flicked his wrist; blue lights from the ballroom chandelier reflected on his knife.

  Pono looked at him and laughed. “You want her? Take her.”

  Edita struggled to her feet, thrusting her face into Pono’s. “Yes! I am his! I am carrying his child!”

  She didn’t even raise her voice. “You raving little slut.” Then she turned, pushing through the crowd.

  Pushing her way blindly down the streets. The lazy daughter, the complaining one, always so yearning and vocal. I want! I want! The one least loved. The one let go of with such ease.

  Holo tried to comfort her. “She isn’t bad, Mama, she’s just a taxi dancer not a prostitute. Don’t you remember our ‘uncles,’ they were all Edita knew. She went down there looking for her father, for some kind of life.”

  “Don’t speak to me of her. Ever!”

  Holo didn’t mention it again. She mentioned very little, seemed adrift in her own world. Then Pono found letters, piles of them ribboned and hidden in her underwear.

  “Who is ‘T’? What does he mean he dreams of holding you?”

  Holo’s face turned white, as if she had been internally punctured. “You read my letters?”

  “I’m your mother. I have the right.”

  She was seventeen. For the first time in her life she had something of her own, something to protect. She turned on Pono, fearless.

  “You have nothing. It’s too late. You should have thought of motherhood when we were young.”

  Insane, she ripped up all of Holo’s letters. “Tell me who he is!”

  “All right, Mama.” Her voice was deadly calm. “By and by you will know everything.”

  Four months later, Holo stood before her with a young man in a cheap suit, a war hero with a shattered shoulder. Holo seemed to be telling her that this was Tang Pin’s son, Tang Junior. That she had loved him all these years, that he was using his G.I. Bill to go to accounting school, and that they had been married the n
ight before. In Pono’s eyes, her daughter seemed to enlarge and recede, so that her left cheek filled Pono’s entire vision, then her face shrank to the size of a pin.

  “Pākē? You have married a Pākē?” Ma‘i Pākē. Stigma. Filth. Her oldest daughter, her pride, stoic witness to the years.

  Later, Pono’s memory would be that of a woman in a moving car, looking backwards—formless shadows, faint screams and flames rising up on either side of her in passing. Only months later would the images rinse clear: Pono attacking the young man, hammering at his damaged shoulder with her fists. Tang Junior trying to remind her who he was, who his father had been, how they had been loyal to Duke and his family’s memory.

  She heard nothing, saw nothing. “Pākē! Pākē!”

  Holo and her husband running down the lane, Pono screaming at their heels. Then, the glowing blue pyre of Holo’s clothes, books, high school honors—she would never graduate. Pono warming her hands at the flames, cursing her forever. Emma and Mina cowering in the arms of the neighbors, too frightened to come home. That night she poured salt all over herself, preserving Holo’s memory, her betrayal, the way salt preserves a corpse. She banged on the door of the lei stringers.

  “Give me back my girls.” She took Emma’s hand with her right, Mina’s with her left. “You want kids, have your own. Dis friendship pau.”

  For days she stared at their dripping flowers overhanging her yard. One night after hours at the cannery, she started slapping wet mortar between ugly cement blocks, lifting them slowly, setting them evenly. She would work until one day the wall was higher than her head, blocking the lei stringers forever from her view. Night after night Mina cried for them. And Pono could hear them crying for her.

  She knelt at Duke’s feet, in abject despair. “I thought I had given our girls character, and conscience.”

  He stroked her head, thinking how one needed love to sustain those things.

  After that, she kept her eye on Emma, pale-skinned, lovely, unpredictable. She seemed afraid of men, avoiding their eyes but moving round them in stops and starts, a victim’s hesitation dance.

  “You will graduate,” Pono said. “You must. And go to university. To honor your father’s memory.”

  She studied prodigiously, seemed to love books and music like her father. This pleased Pono, she gave her piano lessons, allowed her to visit the Listening Room, where for a small fee one could play classical records hour after hour.

  Intent on Emma, Pono ignored the youngest one. One day when she was fourteen, Mina disappeared. A note in Pono’s slipper. “I hate you. You made me indecent.”

  She read the note without sadness, without curiosity, read it almost without seeming to, without meaning to. She read it with a furtive poise, as if reading someone else’s mail. Emma cried for weeks. Mina had been her favorite, the two of them united in a fundamental sadness, the two least wanted. Somehow she surmounted her resentment, tried to comfort Pono.

  “She’ll come back, Mama. She just wants attention.”

  “She’ll come back ruined.”

  Emma thought how ruined they’d been all their lives. How they were born ruined. “We never wanted much. Just a little of your time.”

  “Time?” she whispered. “Ten, twelve hours at the cannery . . . cooking . . . ironing your Catholic uniforms at midnight. Shoes, bills . . . four of you battering at me. No rest, running in my sleep.”

  “I know your life was hard, but sometimes we just needed to be held.”

  “You held each other.”

  “Oh, Mama . . .” She began to cry. “We were children. You never talked about our father. People said we had different fathers. Can you imagine what that’s like. Kids called us ōpala manuahi, bastard trash.”

  Pono gripped her arms, wanting to tell her she carried ma‘i Pākē genes, that her father lived, a monster. She pulled herself together.

  “Listen to me now. I know what people said, that I left you girls and went with men. And if I did? It was for you—food, clothes, Buster Browns. Your father didn’t make much money. But he was a noble, learned man . . . oh, how he suffered.”

  Emma screamed, lost control and screamed for all the years. “Why couldn’t we know him! Why didn’t he come home!”

  Pono flinched, seeing her own wildness in Emma. “In those days . . . there was no work here for locals. They went to Alaska to the mines. And then, the war.”

  “If we could have seen him! Even a photograph. We used to think he was a criminal, somewhere in hiding. You should have taken us to him. You deprived us of a father’s love.”

  Something rose in her, just on the brink of fury. “What do you know of love! When you have survived without shelter, without speech or human dignity, when everything is scraped out of you because you honor something, won’t let go of it . . . then you will deserve that word. It has to be earned.”

  “Why didn’t you love us?”

  “I did, Emma. I thought it was enough. Be glad for what you got. Some get much less.”

  But there were nights she stood looking down at empty beds. Nights when her hands flew to her face, remembering them dancing in their sleeping sarongs like little fireflies, clinging to each other in the dark. The beauty of each child. The shock, so late, of recognition.

  Emma graduated with honors, and with a full scholarship entered the university in Manoa Valley. But there was little pride for Pono, one life could not make up for three. And Holo had been her favorite.

  Loss seemed to deepen her conscience. She began to distinguish between lies that famished, and half-truths that nourished.

  “Your father left me land on the Big Island. There’s a house that’s fallen down. That’s where I sometimes go. One day I’ll take you.”

  Emma seemed uninterested, caught up now in books, the bright and healthful quiet of deep thought.

  The war had brought unionizing, better wages, fewer hours at the cannery. Pono felt suddenly less weighted, a plant pitched forward to the light. Still, sorrows ran deep, and guilt, and she began journeying back in her life trying to see where she had, in her feverish need for Duke, rejected parts of herself that would have made her a better mother, a more human being. She was over forty now, and maybe locating that former self would help her advance to the next phase of her life. She started swimming again, trying to retrieve the part of her cast aside for so many years, trying to fuse that cast-off self with the woman she had become.

  Some days, stroking slowly, she saw fins moving in, listening to her heartbeat. They dove playfully, nudging her hip with their snouts, brushing along her back and shoulders, a gentle, sandpapery seduction. Pono swam with them a while, but only out of nostalgia. There would be time for dialogues, watery eons of shark-dreaming, her ’aumākua time. But for the present, she had to prove she was equal to this swift, disturbing human time. She had no appetite for blood, her jaw did not deform to snout.

  Duke lived, or half lived, in perpetual grief for his lost daughters. But if their life could only be lived in fragments, that would be enough. Imagination was now the palette on which the life not lived, the life imagined, splashed, and breathed. Sometimes, lying on the cliffs above Kalaupapa, in the great choral fugue of nature, he and Pono studied colored plates of El Greco, Bonheur, Hiroshige’s One Hundred Views of Edo. Or Duke read aloud, knowing she loved to project herself into characters and landscapes: to feel the fog of deserted floating palaces, the cold, damp napkins of Mann’s winter Venice.

  He read her Proust, cathedrals built in cork-lined rooms, until she fell asleep. And Gorki, abandoning romance for revolutionary drama of the slums. He read her his own verse: comical self-assessments, a secret vice, dreams of his lost daughters. In that way he kept her a thinker, a contemplator. Sometimes his voice would physically lift her, Pono would dance, dip and spin while he read on, swaying her broad, marbled, stretch-marked hips, long graceful torque of neck, then stand poised, an anchor in perfect arabesque. Only when he attempted to teach her to read did she withdraw, turn
sullen. As if she distrusted printed words, could only accept strangers’ thoughts if they were filtered through Duke’s amazing voice. And so life continued, endurably imperfect. They mourned, they imagined, they connected things with things.

  One day, swimming on the north shore of O‘ahu, across the island from Honolulu, Pono looked up at U.S. bombers flying overhead. In town, new shiploads of American soldiers. People talked about Korea, calling it a “conflict,” about Communist spies on the island ready to overthrow Democracy. She wondered where her daughters were. Would they be safe in another war. She swam to shallow waters, fought the undertow and dragged herself ashore. At that moment she heard something, a different sound, like the ocean clearing its throat. Picking up her towel, she watched small children playing in the surf.

  A man stood up, gazing at the sea. “Strange da kine, too soon for changin’ tide, neh?” The ocean was rapidly receding. The man called out again, “Hey, sometin’ wrong da sea!”

  Pono turned and saw a growing desert. Somewhere off Petropavlovsk the earth had quaked and cracked wide open, creating a towering tsunami heading straight for the Hawaiian Islands. In its first surge backward, the sea had left the ocean floor naked, acres of flapping, acrobatting fish, eels piled like fjords on reefs, giant octopi, astonished and exposed. People screamed, knowing what was coming. Livestock howled, and mongoose ran in squealing droves for upcountry shelter. The sky grew black and mothers swept their children from the surf, running toward high ground.

  Then the ocean changed its mind, turned, and snapped back like a serpent. It approached in one awful wave, so loud it was silent, so massive it seemed to block the sky. Standing nearly eighty feet, it surged at several hundred miles an hour, obliterating the reef, approaching relentlessly. And it arrived, knocking houses flat, bearing cars, machinery swiftly inland. People grabbed for trees, telephone poles; the sound of humans crackling and frying.

  Swept to the top of a construction crane floating like a prehistoric reptile, Pono watched the wave crash into a valley, taking bodies floating face-down. Hitting the point of the valley, the water began its recession, picking up ferocious speed. Railroad cars flew by like massive tankers. Buildings splintered, trucks broken up like toys. People reached out, looking operatic and doomed. Something floated near her, an Oriental boy. Face distorted like a rag, he screamed.