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Shark Dialogues

Page 42

by Davenport, Kiana


  She pointed her finger at each granddaughter. “You and you and you. You are marching, fighting for our people, but while you look the other way, haole are creeping up your holokū!”

  “What do you mean?” Vanya asked.

  “In Kona they say my granddaughters are too ‘high-tone’ to tend the farm, that when I die, you’ll sell it to the highest bidder.” Rachel shook her head. “Silly gossip.”

  “Not gossip! The foreman has been approached by real estate agents, whose clients, haole, want the farm. Disgusting dilettantes who own grape orchards in California, rich snakes who want to preen and pose as coffee growers in Hawai‘i. They don’t even wait until I’m dead. Local growers, rich competitors like the Sugai family, would love to own my orchards, consolidate it into theirs. But they would never sneak up while my back is turned. Only haole . . .”

  “What did the foreman tell them?” Jess asked.

  Toru laughed out loud. “Zakaria started carrying his Remington, the one he’s always polishing. The last real estate agent who came sniffing round asking if Pono needed money, Zakaria flipped his business card in the air and shot it into dust.”

  Laughter in the car, then they turned serious again.

  “This man, your grandfather, I have died for him many times. Waited more than sixty years! Mother God, you girls are just rounding forty, and still don’t know what love is.” She stared from a window, wiped her eyes. “But he is not why you should love the farm, not why you must kneel down on the soil, keep breathing life into it, nourish it.”

  She paused, leaned back and fanned herself, then took a long, deep breath. “No one in history has ever respected those who did not own their own land. Do you know why, for a hundred years Hawaiians have been despised, kept in bondage, looked upon as only half-human by the whites? Because our kings gave away our lands. The haole charmed them, missionaries, merchants, beguiling the royals who traded our precious land for their books, their written Bible, their trinkets. Yes, the written word is powerful, but kings can make mistakes. And so, we paid. You girls know all this, but I am leading up to something.”

  Toru slowed, listening, knowing it was important.

  “The land doesn’t belong to us, you see. We belong to the land. So it ever was, even when we lived under a feudal system, long before the haole came. But this the haole cannot see. They use our land to adorn themselves. And so adorned, they delude themselves that they’re superior. Hawaiians who are stupid and greedy, sell their honor with their land for easy money, then find whites laugh at them, think of them as low, lazy, without culture. For who would sell their land on these small, precious islands? And when they have our land, they teach us nothing by example, only to despise ourselves, take handouts, mortify our flesh with booze, the needle.”

  She hesitated, looked at Toru, then continued. “But—and this is my point—haole are becoming a minority in the world. So severe a minority they begin to look like souvenirs. They’re threatened, outsmarted by Afro-Americans, out-manufactured and out-bid by Japanese, hated in most of Central and South America ...”

  Vanya looked at her in shock. “Tūtū, I never heard you sound so ... informed.”

  “What do you think your grandfather and I have done for sixty years, just bill and coo? He is very learned, speaks three languages. He follows the news, discusses it with me, beats issues into my brain. He believes, and I agree, it is very late for white America. They’re frightened, looking for new victims, so they have turned back to the Pacific, preying on old victims, small island nations like Micronesians, and, yes, even Hawaiians. We are the little men who aren’t really there. You see, they don’t fear us, because we are too small to be assessed. All they have to do is keep us in our place. They do that by buying up our land.”

  As Toru approached the airport she sat up, imperiously arranged her dress and hat. “I’m exhausting myself. What I am saying is: sell the land, you sell your souls, you will damn yourselves to slavery, and keep the whites in power.”

  Inside the terminal at Keahole, they sat waiting to board, watching husky Hawaiians load luggage onto baggage ramps. Arriving tourists smiled at their dark, muscled bodies, handsome, full-featured faces, the ease with which they lifted things of bulk and weight. Departing tourists took snapshots of them.

  “That’s how they see us,” Pono whispered. “Porters, servants. Hula dancers, clowns. They never see us as we are, complex, ambiguous, inspired humans.”

  “Not all haole see us that way . . .” Jess argued.

  Vanya stared at her. “Yes, all. Haole and every foreigner who comes here put us in one of two categories: The malignant stereotype of the vicious, drunken, do-nothing kānaka and their loose-hipped, whoring wāhine. Or, the benign stereotype of the childlike, tourist-loving, barefoot, aloha-spirit natives.”

  They fell quiet then, hearing the boarding call for the thirty-minute flight to Moloka‘i. As they droned over the Pacific, over the saddle-shaped island of Maui, Pono clasped her hands, cold and hard as ice cubes, watching her granddaughters staring from the windows, terrified. At Moloka‘i, a smaller plane took them down the cliffs to Kalaupapa. And on this short ten-minute flight, they huddled near Pono, clutching her arms.

  Time, she thought. I have had so much time. But never time for pity. Mother God! Have pity on me now. I have spat upon a lifelong vow.

  Her breathing became a panting, because she wanted it to happen fast, be over. The landing strip, shocked look of patients who knew her, had witnessed her furtive, solitary visits down the decades, girls following behind her, short walk along the beach to the pavilion, to where he sat each day near clattering palms, the surf. His head turning. Cool indentures of his eyes. Then, slow comprehension.

  He had been dreaming of his family, his mother and father, sisters, cousins, diseased, deserted, buried down the years. Only Duke left, in ruins. In the dream, he stared up at shadows all around him, the cliffs of Kalaupapa like huge columns of lost and wasted years. They moved in close, engulfing him, so that he lay, a human shell, watching them tumble down and bury him.

  He woke with a shout, rubbed the chill from his arms, and saw the day was beautiful, air sharp and clear, the sun relentless. In the distance, teeming jungle, and far above, polished mosaics of cliffs, his cliffs, familiar, safe, benign. He sat back, marveling at nature’s intelligence. Wind blew, and grasses bent. Rain pattered down, and flowers yawned their thirsty throats. Evening fell, and buds closed. Even the air seemed intelligent, changing its temperature with the time of day. He felt immensely wealthy. Interior things were breaking down, lungs, and heart, but he was still in possession of his five senses.

  Then reluctantly, he went back to his dream. And he thought how a family could not live if it did not evolve, how it would exhaust itself, come to the end of its curve. How the living family needed the guidance of the dead, that Mother Tongue whispering ever in the genes.

  But no one guided me. My family died in shame and silence, here, hidden from the world. But for Pono, our blood would have died with me. Our name. Our history. Gone. Without a footprint. Who would know that I had even passed this way? Now I am growing weak. What will become of her? Milimili Pono . . .

  Thinking of her, he spun round and round in his chair again. Only his stubbornness and bad temper kept doctors from declaring Duke bedridden. Instead, they gently humored him, imagining one day a nurse would find him expired in his wheelchair on the dance pavilion. In the evenings, they brought him dinner trays with legs that balanced over his lap, so he seemed to be sitting under a bridge piled high with bland foods, pens, books, newspapers, most of which he ignored. All he wanted now was to sit out on the pavilion, to reminisce, hold Pono’s hand, behold her wondrous face.

  She seemed his only sustenance. Her touch still energized him. He loved her so intensely, still, when she was gone, her mouth remained on his mouth, her hand in his hand, hot like a wound. And some nights he would press his hand, imprinted with the heat of her hand, against his body, his member,
unamazed when it became erect.

  Everything breaks down but desire. And because we’re old, doctors try to shame that out of us. Young punks! Lose one’s youth, and doctors take it as axiomatic that you’ve lost your mind, your balls.

  He chuckled, sighed, thought of Pono’s luscious breasts, giving way to gravity, but still beautiful, hips still embraceable. Only Polynesian women could still incite desire in old age—their slow grace, fluidness in hands and hips, a certain golden tone of skin, and laughter, sly laughter—rendered them ageless, disturbing. And Pono was even more exceptional, had always been a beauty, taller than most men, mysterious and proud.

  He leaned back, thinking of their youth—Pono just a frightened, slender girl when he had found her. But he had found her in another form, fin just diminishing, disappearing, sandpaper skin fading from mottled gray to golden. Shark, the genesis, the destination, of our souls. It only enhanced her in my eyes. That’s why she loved me. I was not afraid.

  “Pono,” he whispered. “. . . who came to me from the sea.”

  He sat up startled, for she was approaching him, the sun against her, so that she seemed a faceless silhouette, coming closer, rising from the sea. He shook his head, sure he was dreaming.

  “Pono. Is it you?”

  “Yes, Beloved.” She stood stark-still, feeling everything suspended, frozen in place—horses in pasture, confetti of gulls against the cliffs. Even the sea behind her seemed to hold its breath.

  His face lit up with happiness. He spread his arms. “Is it time? Third week of the month? Oh, my darling. Come close.”

  She moved mechanically in slow motion. But, up close, she was shocked by changes wrought since last she had seen him, barely a month ago. Among the twisted scars and wrinkles, his big face was still handsome; wild Mephistophelian eyebrows gave him a look of mischief. But cataracts had thickened so now he had a gaze almost cloudy and benign. Bones from his big shoulders had stepped forward, so flesh hung from his upper arms. His posture had changed. He slumped in his wheelchair now, a tired child.

  She rushed forward, hugged his head against her breasts. “Duke, what has happened?”

  He shook his head and sighed. “No appetite.” Then tapped his heart. “Sometimes there’s pain. But seeing you, smelling your perfume, still makes the pulse race. Feel!” He pressed her hand to his chest, then looked at her again. “You’re all dressed up. Where have you been?”

  Self-consciously, she removed her picture hat. Took off her Sunday “toepinch” shoes and sat at his feet, looking round the old pavilion as if trying to memorize it. Out in the waves, a lone canoer rowed slowly toward the Orient.

  “Duke ... oh, Duke.” Her voice was like a child’s, small and begging.

  “You grieve, I know, for Ming. And I grieve, too. Daughters I have never seen, Emma, Mina, gone. Edita, Holo, silent, unforgiving. Now their daughters going . . . life subtracting one by one. And I have only photographs.” He paused. “I have lived my life in shadow. I have kept you in the dark with me. And yet this life we dreamed, this life we improvised, has been richer, deeper than any I could have imagined. Please, don’t be sad, Beloved. Here, lean on me. Tell me all the news, where you have been.”

  She moved closer, dropped her head against his knee. He could feel her body tremble like something combustible. He reached down, removed her hairpins, tenderly undoing the long luxuriant coil of gray hair wrapped round her head. It hung, a thick shawl, billowing about her. She looked up at him like a blind girl, eyes flying round helplessly.

  But when she spoke her voice was cool and neutral. “I have . . . broken a vow. A sacred vow between us. When I tell you, you might hate me. Cast me away.”

  He leaned back, vertebrae exploring the crooks and deviations in the wheelchair. As she continued, he grew still, as still as he had ever been.

  “For years, two generations, you and I denied our blood, our daughters and their daughters. We rendered them invisible, moving like ghosts through all their days. You and I are fading, Duke, our bodies, our vision. ’Aumākua will soon take us by the hand. But there is in me now, an obligation, a white furnace. It burns so bright, it melts away all fear. It is the need, the moral need, to mingle blood with blood, touch flesh to flesh. I have broken my vow to you, in order to keep a vow to Ming.”

  She took his hands, held them to her breast, weeping softly. “Oh, Duke. We have so little time. There isn’t time for pride.”

  His voice seemed to come from another dimension. “Pono. What are you saying? What is it?”

  She saw them in the distance, hovering on the beach behind him, and realized for the first time that they were all in white. They huddled close, then moved apart, like virgins, nurses, acolytes.

  “Mother God, help me!” she whispered. “I have brought them here to Kalaupapa. Your daughters’ daughters. They have come to meet you.”

  And all across the settlement, across that lone peninsula, they heard his scream. The tortured scream of shame, indignity. The scream of generations. Of people mutilated, cast out of the world. It was a cry for mercy, a cry of rage. A cry for all the voiceless victims lying in their graves. It was a wish to run, to die.

  Duke struggled to his feet, insane. He thrust his hands out, pushing her away, took one step forward, then another. He swayed, feeling meager strength desert him, staggered backwards, collapsed in his Amigo, hid his face and wept. Deep within him something rolled into a ball, trying to shrink, to hide.

  Half blind. Ears twisted like green peppers. One hand clawed. One hand gone. Toeless feet. Legs cratered nightmares. Scarred. Twisted. Humped and wrinkled like an ape. I am what normal people pay to look at.

  They came up the slope, a surge of white that paused, unsure. They studied him, what they could see—shirt soft and faded as old dollar bills, broad shoulders of a man once built like an athlete, handsome head of white hair ruffled by the trades. He was sobbing, face down in his hands. Pono knelt before him, whispering, whispering. Finally, she raised her head, nodding for them to come closer.

  They floated forward, silently. And then they stood behind him, panting like young animals who’d run themselves out. He sensed something, sat up gasping and tried to wipe his face. Then, painfully he turned his head and stared, a wide-eyed calm like something cornered. They didn’t gasp, didn’t look away. They held his gaze, each one, looking deep beyond the scars, the mutilation, looking deep within at who he was, and who they were. They smiled, holding out their arms.

  “Grandfather.”

  And it seemed as if the cliffs around him parted, finally releasing his life to him. Watching them surround him, fall on him like children, wreathing him in lei, Pono stepped back. In that moment, he belonged to them.

  No crowds greeted him. In Kona District there were no parades. He came home as he wished, anonymous, a stranger in a wheelchair. But seeing the old Buick at the airport, the one he bought for Pono in the twenties, the same dents where she had banged it with a hammer, he wept behind his sunglasses. And meeting Toru, embracing him, his only “grandson,” he wept again. And driving through old coffee towns, past ancient tin shacks, the old Aloha and Kainali’u theaters, smelling upcountry smells of coffee cherries, charcoal smoke and frangipani—riding backward through the landscape of his youth—Duke was very still.

  Then sliding down Napo’opo’o Road, he saw far below Kealakekua Bay glittering blue and jade, and all around coffee orchards, and macadamia nut orchards, rows of avocado and papaya, outrageous colored flowers, all of nature rioting, a tapestry before him. And turning into the driveway, and seeing on the hill, the house, the same old rockers on the lānai, he let out a long, low cry.

  Field-workers and yard-workers, neighbors and mill hands, lined the long driveway carpeted with flowers, a carpet so thick the car skidded a little. They stood quietly and bowed their heads. They had not come to stare. Many wept for friends and family, victims of ma‘i Pākē, hunted down, banished to that place where they had perished. And when his car had passed on up t
he drive, people went back to their homes and sat in quiet rooms, remembering. And for that day, all the coffee towns of Kona were silent. Mills were shut. No dogs barked. Even doves in the guava trees were still.

  Run Run stood on the lānai in real shoes, a new dress, so neat she looked like someone else. Hair netted, nails trimmed, face rice-powdered. And she was utterly composed. When they carried him from the car, she walked beside him, touching his wheelchair repeatedly, like something she was familiar with and dearly loved. They set him down in the living room, and he squinted at the sunlight, asking them to pull the shade.

  Then he looked at Run Run. “I hope I don’t scare you ...”

  She shook her head, ready for anything. Self-consciously, he removed his sunglasses, then looked up at her.

  She hesitated, then ran to him, covering his face with sloppy kisses. “Look dis face! Look dis face! You still one handsome devil!” Tears streaming, she stood back, trying to regain composure. “Now. What I gonna’ call you? Sir? Lord a dah manah?”

  He laughed, drew her to him with his good hand. “I am Duke. Now. What you going to feed me, tita iki?”

  For weeks, they sat beside him day and night, beside his Amigo, beside his bed, curled up at his feet on the lānai as he lifted his face to the trades. They touched him constantly, kissed his cheeks, wept into his hand, needing to feel him to confirm the reality of him. For the first time in years, Jess didn’t hear the ocean, didn’t miss the suck and pull of tides, arms whirling in her sockets. Vanya lost all need for motion, everything, all legal work on hold. Rachel could not be without him, sat outside his door when he was sleeping.

  In the following months, they told him all about their lives, their work, their travels. And it was as if the man had journeyed all his life, knowing languages, history, art, up-to-date on politics, the madness of the world. He asked Jess about the homeless population in New York, about the Guggenheim Museum, about her work as a vet. He discussed with Vanya malpractice suits, the struggle of Hawaiians to establish sovereignty. He queried her on New Zealand Maoris, the Aborigines of Australia, fighting, like Hawaiians, to gain back stolen lands.

 

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