Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  Gas was heavy in the air. Steam clouds rose from fumaroles, drifting like disembodied spirits. Cars pulled off the road, passengers sick from sulfur dioxide. It was morning but seemed like coming night. They were within five miles of Pu’u ‘Ō‘ō Vent. As long lines of cars locomoted one behind the other, vog grew thicker, sounds louder, rumble and hiss of lava gushing from reservoirs beneath the earth.

  Driving down the Chain of Craters Road, they passed giant pits from past eruptions, stretches of lava of varying ages frozen in their surge toward the sea. In the distance they saw fiery skies, even clouds glowed with the crimson reflection of liquid rock shooting thousands of feet into the air. In this otherworldly region, Pele, Volcano Goddess, reigned, her eerie presence everywhere. Hundreds of locals stood at the rim of the steaming, sulfur-streaked caldera of Kīlauea, inside which was the eerily quiet Halemaumau Pit where Pele lived. People chanted and prayed, asking her to spare another village, another school, a church. And in the distance, Pu’u Ō’ō spewed fresh lava.

  Stepping from her Jeep, Pono pulled herself to her full height. Age had not whittled her spine; nearing eighty, she stood almost six feet two inches tall. Even to foreigners cataracting from tour buses, she was frightening, bewitching. Her stature, flowing hair, dark, handsome profile from another age, and finally her deep, black look, all seemed to say: beware. A warning that magic was real, that this woman of mythic proportion demanded something of all who breathed her air.

  Along the rim of Kīlauea, offerings of joss sticks, roast pigs, pyramids of fruit were piled beside fifths of gin and whiskey wrapped in ti leaves. Tourists aimed their cameras, inwardly scoffing, not knowing that within hours, a cloud would blanket the pit, bringing utter blackness, and when it lifted, the offerings would be gone. But not now, not yet. Pele liked to titillate and tease.

  Now Pono stood at Kīlauea’s rim, chanting, asking Pele to be merciful, calm the surging earth, gulp back down the molten lava. Chanting louder and louder, she looked out across the black desert of older inundations, cold, glittery pāhoehoe—fold upon fold like miles of elephant hide—and a‘a, the ragged, brittle chunks jutting up in peaks. Crowds stood back, watching the towering figure with blowing hair, calling to the pit. She seemed to chant forever so people fell into a standing trance. Then, overhead, clouds were suddenly flung down, and gray silty showers, leaving grit on people’s eyelids and their lips. Pono swayed, seemed to float, the gownlike mu‘umu‘u she was wearing flying out behind her. She chanted louder, flung a fifth of gin wrapped in ti leaf down into the pit. It didn’t break, it didn’t even seem to land. It disappeared.

  And in that moment, Pono’s hair lifted all about her as if by invisible hands. The clouds dissolved and she was a woman lit by colors—neon explosions from her eyes, breasts, joints. People screamed, terrified. When they looked up, Pono was enveloped in a rainbow, the other end of which arched and settled into Pele’s dead, black center, Halemaumau Pit. A German tourist cursed as the lens of his camera shattered. A woman watched her Polaroid melt to black putty.

  “Sleep, Kaiku‘ana” Pono whispered. “You have done enough today.”

  She dropped her arms and walked away, past tourists who would remember her as a shaman seven feet tall, with glowing coals for eyes, a woman with hair of flowing lava, nails of lightning. They would remember her so fantastically, no one would believe them, and in time they would not believe themselves. Disbelieving, they would eventually forget. For such sacred chants, such secret rituals between Polynesians and their gods, were not meant for eyes of malihini.

  She left the pit, the others following behind. Half a mile from Pu’u Ō‘ō Vent, they stepped from their cars again, heat on their faces like an open furnace. Sulfur fumes were so thick, Jess felt she’d swallowed gravel; when she turned, her clothes seemed to burn her skin. Moving closer to the flow, she felt the soles of her shoes begin to melt. They were standing near cooling, encrusted lava, but its surface temperature was still over 200 degrees. A few feet beneath that surface, molten lava still flowed at degrees of 1,500.

  From behind wooden barricades, crowds watched silently, handker-chiefed like bandits as, in the distance red fountains shot the sky, then waves of lava boiled down, igniting everything. On level ground, lava moved slowly, only a few feet an hour, bushes exploding into white skeletons. Like great dripping zombies, trees coated with ash trembled, twisted, then were buried, revealing the flow’s great depth. Farther south, the roar of incandescent lava poured into the sea; at night these lava fountains would be visible for miles.

  Moving away from intense heat that made it hard to swallow, Toru led the others half a mile away to a hardened lava flow that had buried eight miles of villages and forests. They felt the sting in their nostrils, or maybe the memory of things charred, histories erased. Jess shivered, trying to fathom that, twenty feet beneath them, where they stood, where they were walking, were neighborhood churches, graveyards, educational systems, movie houses, people’s bedrooms. She kicked at the crumbling husk of what had been a cow, saw incinerated tractors, skulls of buses, frozen in their sinking. She closed her eyes, imagining people running from their homes, turning back for one more thing, a ring, a photograph.

  Now there was only calm, dead calm, and dunes of hardened lava. Out where late-day mist was rolling in, lava was furred a funereal gray, and here and there families stood formally, or knelt, over what had been their homes. Park rangers moved quietly. And even the Wup! Wup! Wup! of choppers overhead seemed monitored down to a sorrowful sound, as if whipping out, in secret code, WE ARE SORRY . . . SORRY . . . SORRY . . .

  Jess gazed across the land, bleak as a black Sahara. She moved away from the others, her body appearing suddenly older, like that of a woman struggling through sand, weak with a thirst that would be ultimate, attending to her final stare. Toru and the others watched her, for each time she came home, the lava drew her in. She spent hours hiking across charred black land, a woman in a netherworld of jagged dunes. Sometimes she walked for days and nights, nothing but beef jerky, a canteen of water, scorpions and centipedes. Lava deserts were treacherous, people got lost in the dark, lacerated by knife projections of ‘a‘ā. Thin surfaces that gave in to bottomless pits beneath.

  “So foolish, what she does,” Rachel whispered. “One misstep she’s down. Broken leg, crushed ankle. Out there calling, nothing but the sea in front of her.”

  Stoned bikers and hippies were sometimes found wandering in circles for days. Locals said all one had to do was walk inland, keep the sea behind you, and you would come to the end of the lava desert. But knife-sharp ‘a‘ā shredded shoes in hours. One could go sunblind, become dehydrated. Infected bites blew up the body, causing fevers. One could begin to not care. One could die, people had. Jess chanced it every time, obssessed as a Bedouin musing on sands.

  “Got something to do with guilt,” Toru said. “Her mother, neh?”

  “Guilt. Longing. Got something to do with all of us.” Rachel shook her head, keeping an eye on Jess.

  From a distance, Pono watched her too. What is she thinking out there? What is she looking for? She turned away, not wanting to recognize in Jess’s stride, her mother, Emma.

  It was evening, they had been on the lava all day.

  “Come,” Pono said. “We have honored Pele. She will do what she will do.”

  Joining lines of cars locomoting the highway back to Captain Cook, Toru stopped for Cokes, bags of barbecued pork rinds, and Okonomi Mame. Passing the bags back and forth between them, he idled the engine until Pono’s Jeep was lost in the ruby-strung necklace of tail-lights far ahead.

  “Want to show you gals something.”

  After eight or nine miles, he turned the truck off the highway at a sign for Pahala. Jess grinned, recognizing the old sugar plantation town, rows of flaking blue and yellow shacks, corrugated tin roofs, splintered steps of each house studded with zoris, oxidizing coffee cans sprouting orchids. Elderly Japanese and Filipinos leaning on their fences puffed cigar
s and waved, one man holding a vicious-looking fighting cock, its red comb ruffed, a boiled claw.

  Toru made a sudden turn, then flew down a red dirt road, canyoned left and right by waving sugarcane. Jess suddenly recalled how, as teenagers drunk on Primo and ‘ōkolehao, they had drag-raced down these roads, gunning motors, flatbeds whining side by side. Nights of cane-burning, it had seemed they were racing through a hell of boiling molasses, masked cane cutters running with their forks, little nightmare devils black against the fires.

  Toru accelerated, racing them back to a time when they were innocent and whole, wrestling, bullying each other in the careless way of those who loved, not noticing how life was gaining, how much of what was innocent would be discarded. The women whooped and yelled, as tires spun and skidded, the truck bouncing them like melons. Then Toru turned onto a wooden bridge crossing into a sudden rain forest, an oasis out there in the cane. On a muddy path, he slowed, inching along.

  “Oh, my God,” Vanya laughed. “Jade Valley Monastery!”

  They stopped before a large Oriental-looking building, its green-tiled, wing-edged roof like a great mythic bird about to fly. Koa bark walls, rosewood doors, stone lions grinning at the gates. All around, the ancient, penitential smell of incense. Broad steps were scalloped with the passage of monks, acolytes, meditating down the years. Toru pushed the door open, motioned them inside. Imprints of pews, statues, a seven-foot stone Buddha, all moved years ago to a new location. It was like an empty warehouse.

  Vanya looked down at mummies of joss sticks gone to dust, flowers rotted into shadows. “Remember how we’d steal the offerings and neck behind the pews? Me and Chicky Gomez, French-kissing in the Buddha’s lap!”

  He played a flashlight across the room, sleeping bags, lanterns, lauhala mats piled neatly in a corner.

  “People still coming on retreat?” Jess asked.

  “Nah,” Toru answered softly. “That’s our gear. Me and the guys. Sometimes we come on weekends, you know ... sushi, Primo, poker ...”

  “That’s a long drive from Kohala.”

  “... some of them were born round here, down South Point, Miloli‘i way ...”

  Vanya looked at him steadily. “That what you guys talk about ... problems at Miloli‘i?”

  “Why not? They’re plenty pissed off. Ancient fishing grounds and so on, watching their parents shoved out by real estate bastards ...”

  “And what you gonna’ do about it?” She felt herself slipping into Pidgin, which always made talk more intimate and real.

  “... Oh, different ideas . . . preventive measures . . .”

  She strolled round, her voice echoing in the emptiness. “These guys all paniolo, from the ranch?”

  Toru cleared his throat. “Some.”

  “Some. And . . . who the others?”

  “Friends ... from ‘Nam.”

  Jess turned. That word, soft as a mantra, lethal as a blade. It seemed to resurrect the years they thought were buried. Months when Toru was MIA, when they thought him dead. And then the baggage he brought home, snail tracks on his arms. Needles suckling his veins. Years of seeing him a zombie, wishing ‘Nam had killed him honorably. Lack of air suddenly made the place seem stifling. They stepped outside, watched the swoop of hoary bats hunting silently at dusk. Nearby, a thrush, laughing like a girl.

  “You know,” he said patiently, “lot of these guys still need a little help. Over twenty years now, we’re still fighting for a fuckin’ in-patient clinic, right here, biggest concentration of ‘Nam vets in the islands. Guys with PTSD have to fly all the way to Tripler on O’ahu, or even the mainland.”

  Vanya answered carefully. “I thought Congress had approved funds for a vet center here.”

  Toru laughed. “Right. Two million dollars allocated. But first the ‘fiscal studies,’ VA approval, choosing of a site, architects, legal fees, administrative costs. Estimated year of ground-breaking . . . 1998!”

  They walked silently back to the truck. “Oh, well,” he said, “just wanted you to see it again. You know, the memories. Boy, we were young!”

  They sat still for a time, as if waiting for the truck to start itself.

  “What were the arrows?” Jess asked. “Over the sleeping bags? I saw arrows and numbers on the walls.”

  He hesitated. “. . . Distances round the island. You know, here to there.”

  Vanya leaned forward. “Toru. What are you guys up to?”

  He took a slug of Coke, held a barbecued pork rind against the dashboard light. “See those bumps? Those are the pores through which the pig used to sweat.”

  He crunched the rind, turned the ignition, the truck slid quietly down the path. “We’re up to the same thing you are, cuz. Only . . . we’re gonna’ make it happen. Maybe we can make it happen together. You got all that credibility, people behind you, militant lawyers with high-tone degrees.”

  “Make what happen?”

  He shifted gears impatiently. “Don’t you remember that interview you gave the Advertiser. You said maybe the only way for Native Hawaiians to get back their lands was to kick some butt. Make the world sit up and take notice. It’s happening all over the Pacific, people balking at the superpowers. You said . ..”

  “I know what I said. It got me into trouble. And I was half joking . . .”

  “... said maybe we should bomb a military installation, a hotel. Hit them with guerilla forces.”

  Vanya shook her head. “It was just a way of getting media attention.”

  “Don’t give me that, Vanya. You’ve been saying it for years, started people thinking maybe you were right. We tried everything else. Demonstrations, legislation, begging on our knees. They don’t give a damn about Hawaiians, we’re history. All I’m saying is ... think about it. We’re here every weekend, talking, planning.”

  “Toru.” She stared at him, willing him to listen. “You don’t attack your parent country. We’re part of the United States, remember?”

  “Right. Bought, sold, signed, sealed, delivered. Whoever asked us if we wanted statehood? If we even wanted to be a territory? Our history’s based on theft. Our lands, our rights stolen out from under us. In ten years we’ll be Disneyland.”

  She answered quietly. “In ten years we’ll be a sovereign nation, we’ll have our stolen lands back, have our own Hawaiian government again. That’s what all the shouting’s for. You want to blow all that? You’re talking like an Arab. You want us to walk into the State Capitol waving Uzis.”

  His voice changed. Suddenly it was someone else’s voice.

  “Don’t talk to me of sovereignty. They gave it to the American Indians and they’re still dying out . . . poverty, alcoholism, prison. Let me tell you something, Vanya. Know why they’re building that new State Veterans’ Cemetery at Kānehoe? They’re running out of room at Punchbowl. Kānehoe will have casket space for seventy-five thousand new veterans. Didn’t you see the news last week? Projected cost, fifteen million dollars. All for our boys in uniform, the expendables, underedu-cated locals.”

  In the silence, Jess heard her heart pounding.

  “Just think about what I said. You and Jess. You two are out there in the world. You know what it takes. People want violence. Theater.”

  “You’re crazy, Toru.”

  “Maybe. But, with you, or without you, we’re goin’ the limit. Goin’ foah broke!”

  Silently, they watched the highway scroll under them. Toru lit a cigarette, eased up on the gas, and talked about a friend, newly dead. “A skinning knife across his jugular, wife and kids in the next room.”

  The man had just been sentenced to twenty years in prison no possible parole, for possession of a sawed-off shotgun, and for growing a tiny patch of marijuana in his yard.

  “Eight little rows, just enough smoke for himself. And the gun, he wasn’t charged with threatening anyone. Just for possessing it. A one-armed man, how many people could he kill? Everyone I know keeps a gun. Judge said he wanted to make him an example. Imagine this guy, P
urple Heart, Bronze Medal, two tours in ‘Nam. A wife, two kids. In the year 2014, he’d be released a sixty-two-year-old ex-con. Wife gone, kids grown, one arm ...”

  He shook his head, and Jess could see sweat beads on his lip.

  “... Twenty years in prison, twenty thousand dollars a year burden on taxpayers, all told four hundred thousand plus: Money they could use on health care for the aged, education for our kids, AIDS research. Poor bastard. Well, he’s okay now. At peace.”

  He wiped his eyes, cursing softly, drove on a while. “You know, I love you, each one of you. You’re family, all I’ve ever known. Please understand. We’re not nuts. We’re just guys who went to war. Sometimes on weekends, playing poker, a little buzzed, someone remembers and breaks down. I mean, we were Orientals, over there killing other Orientals. Wiping out their families. You think about it, and everything gets real concentrated, real narrowed down.”

  Jess watched the windshield go underwater as her eyes filled up and spilled. She took his hand from the steering wheel, held it to her cheek. “Toru. You never talked about it. We wanted to help you, wanted to ask you about it. We were too afraid. . . . What was it like? I mean . . . ‘Nam.”

  “Green,” he said softly. “.. . Real green.”

  That night, Jess drove Vanya to Keahole Airport for the late flight to Honolulu. Standing at the boarding gate, she asked, “What did he mean, ‘goin’ for broke’?”

  Exhausted, Vanya shrugged. “Old World War II expression. Island boys in combat overseas never quit, even when they were wounded, they just kept fightin, ‘goin’ foah broke’ until they won. Or died.”

  She hugged her good-bye, then strode across the tarmac to the plane. At the foot of the boarding steps she turned, raised her arm, and seemed to freeze mid-wave. Jess waved back, frowning, for Vanya suddenly looked petrified, a clay woman fired in a kiln. Airport lights flicked back and forth across her face. Finally she came alive, mounting the steps slowly as if just regaining sight.