The limp is hardly noticeable, unless he’s stiff from hours on the range. Unlike many paniolo, Toru doesn’t swagger in the saddle, sits straight, intent. His manner is quiet, unobtrusive, a man reined in by tension. Silence seems his natural state so that in crowds of other men—cowboys, vets—he seems held in equilibrium, not drifting too near, not apart. He is most at ease in fog-swept pastures of the Kohala Mountains, overseeing bawling herds, wrangling and branding calves, or just gazing down.
Down into the valleys of the Big Island, south to the pricey coastal resorts, golf fairways, new subdivisions eating up the view. Populated more and more by malihini—people retiring to Hawai‘i from Japan, Europe, the U.S. mainland, people living beside Hawaiians, but overlooking them—the land was being stratified, obliterated, poor families slipping into the cracks.
Toru has heard the rhetoric for years: without industrial progress, more real estate development, Hawai‘i would be depleted of its youth, would experience a brain-drain as local engineers and other professionals emigrated to Asia, the U.S. mainland. They emigrate anyway, seeing in Hawai‘i the coming death of all sane harmonies. Locals left behind labor as manuals, construction men, cowboys, for which they are paid no-pay wages, working for foremen imported from the mainland.
At a Kamuela rodeo, Toru overhears two millionaire developers.
“Bettah pay, bettah pay, that’s all I hear. You think higher wages will quiet these kanaka?”
“No. Erasing them will. Booze, drugs, fast cars.”
Toru smiles bitterly. This is what I fought for. Democracy.
After the war, after years of solace as a needle in his veins, life had been a ghost town. Rehab—Pono stalking him, policing him down nights of nerve ends shrieking for a drop of “junk” leaking down his spine—then University of Boredom, then stasis, his degree a thing he mopped his brow with. Then finally hiring on as ranch hand. And wondering, still wondering, if this was all there was. Sometimes it seemed momentum alone compelled him through the years. Except for nights of stealth, nights when he took the thirty-minute flight over to Honolulu, stole into Ming’s house, her bedroom, wanting to feel her breath on him, enveloping him.
(Her husband snoring prodigiously in another room, off in his orchid hothouse dreams) Toru stood quietly, studying Ming’s arms flung wide in sleep, a human crucified. Some nights he just stood there, burying his face in her clothes. Some nights he lay down beside her, this woman loyal to her pipe. What have I remained loyal to? he wonders. Not even my addiction. In those early years, when he first led her down to Chinatown, nights when he was slick within her, he was sure they were the only living things. The rest of the world, well, that was done with mirrors.
Now, sometimes in sleep, she turned, opened her eyes and stared at him without seeing him. In the dark, behind those fractured eyes, he thought he saw the afterlife. Some nights he turned her body over, tenderly washing the flats of his hands down the slope of her back, birdlike spine, baby hips, all whittled down by Seed. Holding his face against her hips, he wept. Afterwards, he slipped quietly from her house and on the early morning plane back to the Big Island, Toru smelled his hands, the odor of hands that had caressed a corpse. We love that which we corrupt.
Some nights he dreamed of Ming, her lovely face shriveled into a hag, little mama-san sitting in the sun, polishing her new metal legs, then standing, goosestepping proudly. Like Tin Man in Judy Garland movie! Old mama-san, blown into stars of flesh, a human galaxy, outside Hoi An. Occasionally he thought of ending it, there seemed so little of real value left for him. Rubbing the stock of a hunting rifle, he thought how a simple bullet would ease him to the other side, help him get from here to there a little faster—like taking a jet.
But then there was the smell of new grass and fresh dung on the trades, of maile ripe for wreathing, his horse nuzzling him at feeding time, the bleak magnificence of snowcapped Mauna Kea at dawn, a bawling calf begging for its bottle, hoarse-throated songs and slack-key guitars of ancient paniolo, back porch music and Primo beer. And Toru would want to hang around a little longer, fall asleep on his feet in some Honoka’a tavern, jukebox a thumping heart warming his backside.
Now, seeing Jess after several years, he felt energized, as if suddenly bolted from lethargy. Ming and Rachel seemed frozen in time, dolls behind glass, but Jess and Vanya were women of the world, bursting in on him like Trojans. And more, they saw him as heroic, a paniolo, dear and dying breed. They could give him precision, help orchestrate his plan.
And yet, he thought, what do they really know of me? Only what they read and hear, the glamour: trophies, medals, Toru bull-wrestling, bronc-taming, ro-deoing down the years. They didn’t know, could not imagine, the reality. Years of three A.M. reveilles, cleaning shit from stalls and water troughs, mending rusted barbed-wire fences with bare hands—who could afford gloves?—digging holes in frozen earth, dressed in denim jackets stuffed for warmth with newspapers. Knocking cows down at a dead run, dodging flailing hoofs on branding day. Horse-kicked, horse-bitten, thrown. Leg casts, penicillin shots. The horn of a bull entering your side.
And single men’s dorms, fifteen to a one-room bunkhouse from the 1930s (tin roof oxidizing, flaking rust floating up his nostrils while he slept). That was the mid-1970s, people demonstrating across America for equal rights, equal pay, and here they owned you for three bucks an hour. Hundred-thousand-acre ranches owned by rich haole in Palm Springs, men who showed up twice a year in cashmere breeches, English riding boots.
Fourteen-fifteen years later, what did he have to show for it? Crew boss title, the glory jobs of roping, branding. Fifteen to sixteen thousand dollars a year with benefits. Insurance, low-rent housing belonging to the ranch—a house he shared with another bachelor, scruffy don’t-want furniture, Rodeo doodads on the walls—discount meat supplies and milk, hunting privileges, free pasture. But what did he really own? A pickup truck, his horse. And if he left the job, all benefits would cease. He was indentured, like the rest of them. Except for the married paniolo, the ones living off of the ranchlands, two- and three-job men killing themselves to meet keep-you-dowń mortgages.
How could he share this with Jess and Vanya? How, he wondered, could he approach them, tell them about the guys now starting to agitate? Some had been born and raised down near the south point of the island in little fishing villages like Miloli‘i, where ancient outrigger fishing canoes were still used and old fishing traditions were still observed, net-fishing, and hand-bait fishing. The villages were now threatened by that proposed $900 million Riviera Resort, which would destroy everything in the area. Yacht basins, berths accommodating huge seagoing ships, would pollute the waters, scare off or kill all sea-life, deprive old-timers of their only food and income.
Real estate agents were already cruising Miloli‘i (a village so tiny and “quaint,” signs were posted: NOTICE TO PIG OWNERS, ALL STRAY PIGS WILL BE SEIZED ON AND AFTER JUNE 30), offering outrageous prices for small parcels of land. Fishermen had shot the tires out from under chartered buses bringing in potential investors. But two locals had sold out and fled the island. Toru saw that as the beginning of the end. Fishermen giving in, selling out, becoming no-job, no-land people, pockets full of haole money which they would blow on fast cars, high-tone rents and booze. One day they would end up living in Honolulu’s slums. The pattern kept repeating itself.
On weekends now, some paniolo drove down toward South Point, joining groups of local men blocking roads to outsiders. Across lava boulders along the roads, huge words were painted in stark white: KAPU! HAOLE. . . KEEP OUT OR DIE! Locals knew it wasn’t enough. Federal officials on the island were too greedy, too much money had already passed hands. Something drastic needed to be done.
When Toru first heard the federal government wanted to make a spaceport of Ka Lae, he bowed his head. The landing place of the earliest Polynesians in the islands, Ka Lae was sacrod, Hawai‘i’s Plymouth Rock. Southernmost point on the Big Island, it was only twenty or thirty miles from Mil
oli‘i, and if developers had their way, within a decade the entire southern half of the Big Island would be obliterated.
Which is already happening here, he thought, looking down from the graze pastures of Kohala to the Big Island’s west coast. It was lined with four-star deluxe resorts like the Halenani, House of Splendor, a rich man’s ghetto of six low-rise towers connected by lagoons and bridges, guests ferried from shops to restaurants in motorboats, gondolas, even a train. A visual orgasm of Greek, Italian, Mayan, Chinese, Indonesian, Oceanic art and sculpture all strung together by marble halls connecting the towers.
The Halenani, where, for the amusement of guests, eight dolphins were imprisoned in a pond less than the size of an acre. Now and then a dolphin died, ciguatera, pollution from the motorboats, an infected human’s hands, who knew? and more dolphins were shipped in. Each time Toru drove past the place, he thought of the dolphins at night, circling, hearing the clicking, squeals and chirps of their own kind calling to them from beyond lava walls too high to leap. The ocean, so tantalizingly close, so impossibly attainable.
One day, watching tinted-window limos turning at the entrance to the Halenani, limos driven by locals whose families could not afford a meal there, were not allowed to swim there, Toru experienced a kind of jolt, a mental spasm, raw vision of a plan. He began brooding, studying his friends, wondering who he could trust. Day after day he studied them, weeding out, discarding. And during that time, Pono had summoned her girls home.
Jess woke in an old koa four-poster, watching lace curtains dance in the trades. A lei of burnished kukui nuts hung on the wall, catching sunlight like dark mirrors. She sat up lazily, drawn by the smell of cooking fires sweet with bark of coconut and guava. The weeks since her arrival had slowly uncreated her. A general shedding, of shoes, mainland clothes for soft, faded house-sarongs, even a sloughing off of skin, pale outer layer going pink, then red, blistered patches peeling into tan, slow bronze.
She even shed her English, as island Pidgin slid from beneath her tongue where it seemed to have been simmering. “Good food,” translated into “‘Ono loa!” “You know what I mean,” became “You know da kine?” Every day she shouted up the stairs to Vanya. “Wiki wiki for da beach!” Now, her every sentence seemed to end in “Yeaah.” “It’s goin’ be one hot day, yeaah?”
And then the first Pacific submerging—mother-stroke of waves against her skin, not like the cold, metallic slaps of the Atlantic. And then descending—coral branches scraping shins and wrists, tattooing her with scabs. And then the nights, wrapped in odor of ripe guavas, rotting papaya, narcotic sizzle of ginger. The smell of pomelo, big as human heads, thunking to the ground.
Ah, pomelosl Like giant grapefruits stuffed with scent. Inside coarse yellow skin, white flesh thick as fillets smelling like gardenias. And under that, veiny grapefruit sections like big prawns containing globules green as peridots, and pink, like rose quartz. The wet, glittery green was sour, but the pink was sweet as sugar cubes. One could not stop sucking. The sour made you hungry for the sweet, which sent you back to the sour. Afterwards, after the strenuous ritual of peeling and eating one of these monstrosities, Jess would rub the flesh across her cheeks, feeling her face tighten. For days her hands and arms would smell of gardenias.
Sometimes she woke before dawn, leaned from her window, yanked a pomelo from the tree, and lay it on her pillow like the scented head of a lover, one that required nothing and would not wound her. She closed her eyes, caressed the fruit, its slightly oily, fragrant skin reminding her of Mars: bawling jazz bands, ambulance sirens, his long, black, graceful hands pushing her away, out of scrupulousness, out of anger. Mars telling her she was living wrong, wrong rhythms, wrong priorities, that her history was taking place without her. That he would not be in her life.
Some days, just cusping dawn, she glided down to the kitchen, joining Run Run. Like two grinning Aborigines, they squatted before the wood stove cupping hot bowls of fresh Kona coffee, each woman lost in glowing embers of a bark fire, fragrant woody smoke curling in their hair like dreams. One morning Run Run looked at her, juice of fresh mango dripping down her knuckles.
“You know, Jess, foah shoah, you real kanaka kine, not high-tone haole kine. Sometime I t’ink you more da kine dan all de ot’ers put togeddah. Swim foah hours in da sea, squat wit’ me at dawn, eat wit’ fingahs. And how you get dat look sometime, dat Pono-look, like you diggin’ down, listenin’ to da whisperin’ in yoah blood!”
Jess shook her head. “Strange, yeaah? Me, the outsider. The one she likes least.”
Run Run shouted at her. “No talk pupule! You more in dan out. It’s de ot’ers worry me. Rachel like one wind-up doll for dat Hiro. Ming floatin’ off and off, like she nevah be pau sick. And Vanya! When not doin’ shame kine t’ing wit’ strangahs, so busy wit’ politics forget what she politicking foah! Foah us, local folks. For taro patches, one small plot for livin.’”
She stood, stirring a pot maliciously. “Know what she say me? She no like poi! Nevah did. She make me cry, make my old gums hurt. Poi Dat like juice of mama’s tee-tee. And—you ready?—she no like swim no moah. Say it boring, nevah did like. Mot’er God. Somet’ime I t’ink you don’ come home foah good, Jess, we all goin’ disappear. Not’ing left behind to show we evah been!”
Jess frowned, still disbelieving. “Pono gets nervous when I stay too long. I remind her of too much.”
Run Run gently shook her arm. “Hold dat tongue . . . and lissen. We runnin’ out of time. Pono love you. Because guess what? You a lot like her. Try read behind de eyes when lookin’ in her face.”
Later, gathering ‘opihi on wet rocks, tossing live cowrie back into the sea, Jess replayed the conversation, trying to imagine Pono loving her, wanting her there permanently. Wanting any of them there. This hoarder of secrets, always keeping her granddaughters, the world, at bay. Yet, this was where Jess felt she belonged, she had always known it. Back in New York, she was clanless, no one to shield her, make claims on her. No one to comfort her when men—her husband, Mars—walked out because she was too dark, too light, too angry, too timid, not tough enough. She felt sterile and wasted in New York, her life seemed to have gone underground, a world of humid, artificially lit rooms, convalescing animals in cages. Only here, at home, did Jess feel alive, a sense of coming back to her self, as if from long banishment.
Here, it was possible to get very close to the actuality of things. The sea was the sea, lava was lava. One washed away the beaches, the other kept belching up more land. She woke at dawn and drank a cup of coffee, brewed from beans she had helped harvest one year. That season she had picked so long for so many hours so many weeks, her fingers split, her back creaked like a crone’s, cherry basket hanging from her waist growing fuller and fuller, into a twenty-five-pound monster fetus that at day’s end left her hiding, weeping in excruciating pain. But that was how it was done, you picked until baskets were full. You did not stop to empty half-baskets into burlap sacks.
When one had picked for that long, with that intensity, something happened, the coffee beans had become Jess’s beans. The beans had somehow become her. Now, when she heard coffee beans dancing and popping in the roaster, when she smelled the pungent oil and mossy, sharp aroma as it perked, felt the first frisson when it slid across her tongue, and swallowing, feeling it jazzing her system awake, she remembered the winey smell of ripe coffee cherries, Filipinos, Mexicans, Micronesians humming or whistling as they picked, their earthy sweat, tobacco, their brilliantine. She remembered a hornet stinging her cheek, a big ponderous rat eyeing her between the trees. She lived the cup of coffee, drinking it was not something she did in passing.
And walking barefoot to the mailbox wormy feel of rotten liliko’i seeds squishing between her toes and driving to Kamagaki Market hoards of frangipani like dead butterflies stuck against her windshield and pulling lush tomatoes from red dirt shaking down ripe avocados for lunch watching Run Run slurp one-fingah poi and carrying ‘ōpakapaka home from fishing boat
s blood scrolling down her leg and lip-smacking laulau grease scootering round her wrist and reading by kerosene or candlelight in storms Benny Goodman on scratchy 78s or Ming downstairs on the piano Chopin études ghosting up and down the halls and watching a momcat go berserk eating a new litter leaving only the tiny heads and termites whispering in ancient volumes Thackeray Yeats “The Queen’s Book” by Lili’uokalani and camphored linens damp perfumed sheets her cousins calling out in dreams.
Jess was not on vacation when she came home. She had to earn life minute by minute, pay attention to each thing, not cheat her senses. And she wondered if maybe in this attentiveness, one day she would find what she needed to live by, a code, a deep abiding conviction. Maybe that’s why we keep coming back, each of us. Trying to find the clue. Maybe Pono is the clue. Nothing else has ever terrified me so.
While Jess stood brooding on the sand, her grandmother sat high above her on the cliffs, pulling up medicinal roots, herbal leaves, the healing popolo, kukui, la’i. It was noon, bringing gentle Kona rains; across the land coffee trees glittered like dark emeralds. Pono stood, watched her granddaughter’s slender form jog down the beach in splashes.
A woman now, early forties, battling life on her own. Did I help her all these years? Give her enough clues on how to survive? I tried, God knows. In my keep-your-distance way, I tried. Pathetic, skinny little white thing when she first arrived, but she had Emma’s eyes. I knew she could hurt me, outsmart me like her mother. Emma, scholar, lover of music, and the sea. She chose the white man’s world, and died alone, of thirst. But I gave to her girl. What I had, what I could afford. Summer after summer.
Shark Dialogues Page 28