Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  There was such silence, such shaking of heads. A disbelieving. And then a terrible keening resounding through the house, wafting through the windows, a sound like old Greek women dressed in black, in mourning. The need to stand, stroke the linens on the bed, press their faces to the pillows. The need to shake Toru, abuse him, make him understand they did not understand.

  He looked at Jess. “You saw it coming, you said you could smell it, that ammonia smell of failing kidneys. You said you could see his heart failing in the blueness of his fingernails.”

  She nodded, dumbfounded. “I thought there was time, that Tūtū would get him to the hospital. My God, where are they?”

  He sobbed it out. “Shark Bay! She said when it was time, when there was no more time, they would go. One night they would paddle home to ‘aumākua.”

  Rachel knelt forward, banged her head against the floor repeatedly. She had seen the Buick after midnight, easing down the driveway. Now she made screaming, barking sounds, trying to articulate. The moon was full. I thought they were going for a drive. She could say nothing sensical.

  “How do you know? How!” Vanya shook Toru violently, her face an ugly mask.

  He grabbed her arms, like a man about to kiss her. “I helped them. She told me where to hide the canoe, under the kiawes, below Pu’ukohola. I went there every morning. This morning it was gone. The Buick was there.”

  Vanya hit him in the face with all her might, then threw herself upon him, sobbing. Their escalating screams took wing, wafted through the windows, rendering workers silent down below. Toru hugged Vanya until she calmed down. Then he sat down in a chair, took Run Run in his arms and rocked her like a child. They gathered round him in shock, in aspirating disbelief.

  “. .. they wanted to make together,” he said. “Is it such a terrible desire? They were over eighty. The world kept them apart for over sixty years. The shock of being in a hospital, another institution, after six decades of it, would have killed Grandfather. They would have died apart. Can you imagine?”

  Jess wept softly, holding Pono’s robe to her face.

  “Somehow she got him into the canoe. Then she must have paddled out.” He wiped his eyes. “And then they slept.”

  “Maybe they’re still out there,” Rachel cried. “Lost at sea. Oh, Mother God. Let them be alive.”

  “Rachel, how can you?” Toru asked. “Isn’t it better that they go in privacy and peace.”

  She sobbed out loud. “I wanted to tell them I have plans, to accomplish an important thing. I wanted her to be proud of me.”

  Vanya’s voice was ugly. “Of course she was proud of you. You take after her. Everything she did was desperate.” She stumbled, blind and brokenhearted, from the room.

  Within hours, all of Kona knew. The grieving in the house was taken up by keening in the fields, and then the little towns. By evening, people lined the driveway and Napo’opo’o Road all the way down to Kealakekua Bay. There, crowds stood holding torches. Chanting went on all night, kāhuna spanking the waves with ti leaves as canoers paddled boatloads of flower lei out to the deep, calling out to ‘aumākua manō, asking them to guide Duke and Pono home.

  Locals thought they had set out on their way-finding voyage from Kealakekua’s shores, that they were sleeping in the waters of this bay. Only Toru and the others knew their grandparents had departed from Shark Bay, an hour north of here.

  “Better this way,” Toru said. “Let Shark Bay be left in peace, no crowds, no ceremonials. And anyway, it’s all the same. They’ve gone home to the Mother Sea.”

  Through days and nights, they roamed the house like phantoms, disbelieving she was gone, waiting for her scent, her gaze, her sudden presence overwhelming them, turning them infantile. Vanya denied her grief, went on with late night rendezvous with locals, with boats carrying crates of dynamite making drops off Punalu’u, not far from Jade Valley Monastery. Rachel locked herself in her room, alternately sobbing and brooding over a crumbling sepia snapshot, her mother as a girl. Now the mother-link was dead, the girl was set adrift.

  Jess’s pain was articulated in the way she clung to Run Run like a child. “I insulted her, insulted our ancestors, told her we would end up sluts. Those were my last words to her. My God, I want to die.”

  Run Run shook her head. “No, keiki, you want live. Lissen me, you be strong, neh? My sistah gone. I no want live widdout my sistah. I need someone be strong, help me find out what Mot’er God plannin’ foah me. No reason keep me goin’ widdout plan.” She wept a little. “Pono give me pride, importance, dignity. You know da kine?”

  Jess hugged herself and rocked. “I want her back. I won’t know how to live without her.”

  Night after night, she drove to Shark Bay, calling out to Pono. Her grief did not subside. Even after weeks, then months, it was so raw, so wrenching, Jess seemed to lose touch with herself, did not know how to move her body, amazed when her body moved on its own. In a daze, she crisscrossed the coffee belt, threading her way in and out of Captain Cook, Kainali’u, Hōlualoha, birthing lambs, saving cows from milk-fever death with intravenous calcium. She slogged through barn muck, taking blood samples from squealing hogs, scrubbing her rubber boots with lye soap to avoid spreading disease, then driving Pono’s old truck to Shark Bay, smelling of manure, feed dust, and livestock.

  Her practice was now far different than it had been in Manhattan, work she now recalled as moribund and bloodless. Here it was dirty, physical, sometimes scary. A convulsing piglet showed symptoms of a sickness that could wipe out a farmer’s entire operation. A feverish steer could infect a herd of hundreds. Some calls were routine: shots, births, a mare needing her teeth filed, a rabbit with a rheumy eye. Some were challenging—a llama in Kohala needing cataracts removed, a quarter horse’s deep depression after being gelded. Jess refused to perform the gelding operation but afterwards, through dap and nights she sat with the huge beast, soothing it slowly back to, if not joy, then well-adjusted melancholia.

  One night at Kealakekua Veterinary Clinic where she was now an associate, Jess sat at a microscope, checking a rooster’s blood sample for parasite eggs. She made notations, closed the file, nearly paralyzed with exhuastion, so fatigued she did not feel the weight of grief, felt only the constellation of moments, small but brilliant incidents that had made up this day, its odd caprices and impulses. A newborn calf’s blood and stench, its blind nuzzling of her chest, looking for a teat. The burst heart of an overworked sheepdog, dying on pillows like a rajah. The sobbing of the hapa who had driven it too hard.

  That night her fatigue-trance drove her not to Shark Bay, but directly home. And though, in Jess’s dreams the wild sea drubbed and hummed on empty beaches, beating like a fateful drum, and though in sleep she called out for Pono, she woke knowing grief was moving over, making room for other things.

  Squatting before the kitchen stove with Run Run, she described blind fatigue that drove her home the night before. “I never got to Shark Bay. I forgot to mourn.”

  “Mono no aware,” Run Run whispered. The impermanence of things. Even grief.

  The attorney was slender as a girl, delicately handsome in spite of an astounding overbite. His grandfather had been one of the Filipino unionizers who befriended Pono in Chinatown in the 1930s. She had financed this man’s way through Stanford Law School. He read the will, looking at each of them in turn. The house, coffee orchards, the land beyond, nearly three hundred acres, had been split four ways, Ming’s share going to Toru. Her children, now professionals in California, wanted nothing to do with the place. Neither did Ming’s parents. Ten acres overlooking the bay at the south end of the property had been set aside for Run Run.

  “True?” she said sadly. “Now I a landowner?”

  The others smiled, knowing, with Pono’s help, she had been buying up small plots of land for years. Nothing as prime, though, as this ten acres overlooking the sea.

  She immediately signed the land over to Toru. “Give him somet’ing worry over.”

/>   The next morning, Rachel flew over to Honolulu. Two days later she flew back, handing Jess a sheaf of documents.

  “Power of attorney. If anything happens to me, everything I own goes to you, Toru and Vanya.”

  Jess looked at her steadily. “Why would anything happen to you?”

  She chose her words carefully. “I’m going, Jess. Out. Into the world.”

  “What?”

  “I want to see if I can stand it.”

  Jess moved close, took her by the shoulders. “I need you, Rachel. Pono’s gone. Ming. Vanya’s turning into someone else. You have to help me carry on.”

  Rachel sat her down and they were face to face. “Listen to me. All your life you’ve been trying to get home. You made it, Jess.”

  “What has that got to do with . . .”

  “All my life I’ve wanted to grow up, break out. I was too terrified. I knew the world would show me how useless my life was. You see, I couldn’t violate the order of self-imprisonment I’d chosen. Now I can.”

  “But, where are you going? How will you know how to talk to people?”

  She explained about Ban and his sisters. About going to Thailand. “I want to sponsor them, bring them here. It won’t take long. Hiro had connections everywhere, Immigration, Board of Health, the U.S. Embassy, people who in return for a few favors, would like me to erase them from his files. The girls will live with me in Kahala, go to school, one day university. In summers they can work here in the orchards, a healthy environment ...”

  Jess stared at her in utter shock. “How can you do this? Why do you want to?”

  “Money is a strange thing, Jess. It helps you find out who you are. A part of you sits back and watches, waiting to see what you’ll do when there are no limits. Hiro left me millions, as you know, profits from his water trade: drugs, gambling, prostitution. I’ve already given a good deal away. Scholarship-funds for local kids, and so on. Now I want to help these girls, and others. If they’re sick, infected with the AIDS virus, I’ll give them first-rate medical attention. I know it will take time. You see, time is what I have.”

  “My God,” Jess whispered. “I can’t believe this.”

  Rachel smiled. “You know, all my life I dreamed one day I’d find my mother working the streets in some place like Hong Kong. I’d bring her back to Honolulu, take care of her. Maybe helping young girls is a way of doing that.” Her voice broke. “. . . Of bringing Mother home.”

  Jess studied her as if memorizing her, this cousin Siamated to her in the search for mothers they would never know. How had it come to this? Each woman flung out blindly into space, whirling alone on her own trajectory. She blamed it on Pono. The years with her had left them perilous, extreme, women balanced on the jagged edge. Conversely, Jess saw how her grandmother had indemnified them against that which was false, fleeting, or detestable. Now she hugged Rachel telling her she loved her.

  “I don’t have the right to try to talk you out of this, though it sounds insane. But, knowing you, it will somehow deviate into good sense. Will you just please be careful. I don’t want to lose you.”

  Rachel smiled. “I was always careful. I was the one picking up the pieces in this family. No one ever noticed.”

  Jess stood, sounding suddenly harsh, determined. “Before you go, help me talk to Vanya. I don’t want to lose her either.”

  They sat in the living room of the big house, Toru beside Vanya, Rachel and Jess facing them like opponents. Run Run banged and clattered in the kitchen, peacocks shrieked outside, and at first they were silent, trying to marshal their arguments, their declarations. Jess wanted to say things that would save their lives, but she didn’t know what the words were.

  Vanya broke the silence. “This is going to be a waste of time.”

  “I hope not,” Jess said. “I just need to understand what you people are trying to prove.”

  “That we’re not dead meat. That we won’t back quietly into history.”

  “Can’t you do it without ...”

  “It’s too late,” Toru said. “Don’t you read the papers? Every environmentalist in the islands is behind this movement. They’re pushing for boycotts, storming the governor’s mansion. They’ve had enough.”

  “Great,” Jess said. “That means they’ll carry posters with your pictures when you’re in federal prison.”

  Vanya leaned forward. “Jess, I love you. Even though we haven’t always understood each other. But now our trains are definitely on different tracks. You’re carrying on Tūtū’s tradition, the farm, the coffee business. We need that, without land we’re slaves. But, someone has to fight for preservation of that land. Don’t you understand?”

  Jess pointed a finger at her, almost shouting.

  “This is what I understand. When environmentalists go up against billion-dollar businesses, business . .. always . . . wins. I can’t think what these industries are doing to our air, our reefs and soil. But they didn’t steal the land, Vanya. Someone—a farmer, or rancher, or Boards of Trusts—someone local sold that land. When you’re flinging bombs round the island, how many of these people will support you?”

  “Enough. Toru feels the same.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Jess said softly. “He already fought his war, several times.”

  Toru looked at each of them, looked down, rubbed his damaged hand. It had healed as well as it would heal, fingers stiff, tendons permanently scarred. His voice was deep and resonant.

  “I signed a treaty with my government when I went to ’Nam. I would fight for them, maybe die for them. But if I survived, I could come home and live in peace. Somebody screwed me. I signed a bad treaty. All the politicians and developers and scientists who defend democracy, they don’t give a . . . shit about the environment.” His voice grew softer. “This island’s all I’ve got, the only place that means anything at all.”

  “You might have to die for it.”

  “Dying’s nothing. It’s not enough.”

  In the kitchen, Run Run was suddenly still.

  “We’re dying anyway,” Vanya said. “We were lost when we were born because we’re Polynesians, intelligent, competitive, vain. We coveted things haole owned. They gave us progress, we gave them land. What I can’t understand is, why nature has to pay.”

  “When has nature not paid?” Rachel asked. “What I want to know is why we, this family, have to pay. We’re practically extinct. Why do you have to jeopardize your lives? Do you despise us so?”

  Vanya did a slow turn, staring at her. “Miss Big Bucks. Have you forgotten you donated money to this cause?”

  “I thought you were just going to blow a fishing yacht, make a statement.” Rachel shook her head. “How stupid of me, Vanya. I forgot you’re Major League. You have to dynamite hotels, make headlines, though people might be killed.”

  Toru shrugged, with a resignation that made no threats and bided its time. “BORN TO KILL. BORN TO DIE. That’s what they trained me for.”

  Jess studied him, feeling immense sadness. Yes. Maybe he is tired of living.

  They argued relentlessly through dinner, name-calling, attacking each other like wild dogs. And as they debated into the night Jess saw her argument was lost. Vanya’s “revolution” no longer sounded like a moralistic move. It had become for her a drug.

  Defeated, feeling all was lost, Jess lunged at Vanya in a desperate, tawdry move. “It seems to me, the villains in all of this, the ones raping our lands, are foreigners. Mostly Japanese and haole. Right?”

  Vanya nodded, weary of the game.

  “Yet you are importing a foreigner to fight beside our people. You’re gambling all your shipments, your plans, your campaigns on this .. . haole. How do you know he’s not a plant, someone working for the military?”

  Toru glanced round the table, his eyes coming to rest on Vanya. “What the hell is she talking about?”

  “Simon Weir,” Jess said. “Ex-Green Beret, or whatever they call them in Australia.” Vanya looked at her with su
ch profound hate, Jess felt her stomach contract. “Sorry, cousin, I listened in on the extension.”

  Run Run suddenly appeared, ignoring everyone but Vanya.

  Banging round in the kitchen, kicking Ula, the mongoose, from underfoot, it had come to her what she was being saved for, what Mother God had in mind. It had come with such startling clarity that, standing in the doorway, Run Run seemed to glow.

  Now, she beckoned Vanya. “Come. I need talk wit’ you.”

  Still in shock, Vanya rose, drifted from the room, leaving the others facing Toru.

  “Simon Weir. Her lover,” Rachel said softly. “She’s bringing in the enemy. How does that make you feel?”

  Toru pushed his chair back, looked from one to the other. “I never thought you’d sink to being cunts.” Quietly he left the house.

  In her room, Run Run threaded her rosary through her fingers. She touched the feet of Jesus hanging bored and crucified on the wall, and in a show of divided allegiance, rubbed the head of a Lotus-positioned Buddha. Then she snapped off her ancient Philco shaped like a miniature jukebox.

  “Sit, I want show you somet’ing.”

  Easing herself into a creaky, monkeypod chair, Vanya was struck by half a dozen bottles of medicinals for leaking bladders, for arthritis, for sleeplessness. She looked up in shock, as if realizing for the first time that Run Run—this deeply loved fixture in their lives—was old. Pono’s death had aged her twice as much. Her room had the melancholy smell of tired flesh, a woman on the brink of giving up.

  “Oh, Run Run,” she cried, throwing her arms round the old woman. “Whatever happens, remember not to hate me. Remember me the way you loved me best, when I was young.”

  Run Run pulled away. “Keiki, I nevah love you moah dan now. You pupule I t’ink, but still got principle. But I goin’ curse you if you no do what I say. I goin’ curse you to death. Now. Shut up. Close mouth. Look de eye.”

  Vanya stared at what she was pointing to. In her hand, Run Run held an object the size of a grape. A perfect sphere, reflecting light from such depths, it seemed to pulsate from black to deepest blue.