Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  “Look.” Vanya’s flashlight picked out trees far in the distance. “As we get closer, the lava will become level with the ground, where the flow slowed and finally stopped.”

  It was almost three A.M. In another hour they were near the trees, palms swaying and rustling in moonlight.

  “No more flashlights,” Simon said.

  They heard a truck somewhere on a highway. They heard the barking of a dog.

  “What about your cousins?” Simon whispered.

  “Dey dere, foah shoah,” Lloyd said. “All I gotta’ do is signal.”

  “Listen now. We must be very prudent. We have to go under the assumption that each step we take is a potential ambush.”

  Lloyd pointed toward the stand of trees. “We get close to end of lava, we move into dat grove. Where highway starts again, is like big parking lot where church was. Dey moved da church when lava started comin’. My cousins waitin’ dere. I guarantee.”

  Ho‘auhuli

  * * *

  Revolution, to Overthrow

  THE SMELL OF TREES AFTER EIGHT HOURS, pure air entering their pores. They flung themselves face-down in grass, momentarily stunned by the runneling off of adrenaline. The sky had changed, a lessening dark, confusion in the light. After a few minutes, Lloyd rose, moved deeper into the trees. They followed at a distance. A hundred yards ahead, the parking lot seemed to float under a lone streetlight. Half a dozen trucks and cars.

  Lloyd squatted, took several deep breaths, stretched back his neck and let loose with an awful keening sound, hellish and occult, so blood-chilling Vanya felt atavistic hairs ride the back of her neck. Simon counted the ripples down his spine, feeling as if someone were probing his eyeballs with needles. He thought of human sacrifices, black masses, cannibals.

  “Jesus,” he whispered, “that’s the most disgusting, foul and filthy sound I’ve ever heard.”

  “I thought you knew jungles,” she said. “That’s the sound of wild boars mating.”

  Lloyd waited, made the hellish sounds again. An engine started, a second engine coughed. Two cars made a lazy circle round the parking lot, aiming their headlights at the trees, and blinking several times. Cautiously Lloyd stood, and whistled. Someone whistled back. He waved Simon and Vanya forward, and they were running, flinging themselves into the cars, speeding off before they’d even closed the doors. Miles down the road the cars turned right, then left, and right again, pulling up before a shack.

  Inside, two men hugged Lloyd, slapped him on the back. “Eh, cousin, howzit!”

  Then they stood back, studying Simon. They were locals, but there was something deadly and alien about them.

  Simon sized them up immediately. “Where’d you boys train?”

  “U.S. Navy. S.E.A.L.S.”

  He grinned. “I probably coordinated with you boys in ’Nam.”

  One of them stepped forward, a wiry, muscular Hawaiian-Chinese. “We’re not boys. You’re not coordinating with us now.”

  He turned back to Lloyd. “You’ve got two hours till oh-six-hundred. The plants are nine miles down the road. Once you hit them, you’re moving targets.”

  He looked at Simon again. “So. What’s your interest in this? Got a hard-on for Eskimos? Navajos? Hawaiians?”

  Simon glanced at Vanya, endeavoring to keep calm.

  “I like Australians,” the man said. “Dumb. But tough. Only, why can’t you suckers stay away from our women?”

  “Now look, mate . . .”

  “You look. We’re doing Lloyd a favor, he’s ‘ohana. One favor, that’s it. This is our territory. We have our own agenda.”

  Very casually, he took the gym bag from between Simon’s feet, looked inside at the bombs, the intricate wirings.

  “Hmmm. Not bad. Just enough to soften up those plants for us.”

  He stood up, took Lloyd by the arm. “So. You make your contact, then you leave this district. Drive real fast. And take care, cousin, neh?”

  He hugged him like a brother, then left with the others, all piling into one car, leaving a nondescript Hyundai behind. Outside, clouds lowered, the morning cool and overcast. The three of them sat quiet in the empty shack, like coma victims, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, so exhausted, they neither spoke nor moved. After a while, Simon stepped outside, relieved himself, stroked the gym bag like a pet, then sat down again.

  Vanya studied him, with no sense of seeing, for she was looking inward. Mine has been a life of running. And why, I wonder, why? What is in the distance that will heal me? She dropped her head, saw Pono running through time, shattering the years like glass, a woman of heat and light, scathed, nearly broken, but running on, sizzling through the clear paralysis of mediocre lives. Tūtū! Where are you now? I need you. Something is pointed at me. Something is gaining.

  Casting about, trying to focus on something, her gaze fell again on Simon, his swollen ear, neck red with rash, and her grandfather’s voice came back to her. Think. Only think. What you do will be irreversible.

  “Simon!”

  He lifted his head, alarmed.

  “I’m going to die,” she whispered. “Death, it feels so close.”

  He came and sat beside her and she saw his eyes were wet. Rapidly, he blinked them dry. “It’s all right, sweetheart. No one’s going to die, we’re just delivering a gym bag.”

  “What’s wrong,” she asked. “Why are you sad?”

  “... I was thinking of those folks out there, those villages, all the lives beneath the lava. I was wondering how nature, which is all we know of God, can be so damned cruel, so mindless!” He wiped his eyes again, and put his arm round her, a way of comforting himself.

  “I don’t know the answer, Simon. Who can know? The earth came first. This place was born of lava. It flows, and it abides. Maybe that’s why we worship the sea, it’s the only thing that stops the lava.”

  “Then why do folks stay on?”

  “The land is in us now. They say this was a sacred island, not meant to be inhabited, only worshiped from a distance. Ancestors breached those sacred laws, and devastation came. Walls of flowing, boiling lava. Thousands died, or lost their minds. Survivors had no memory. They stayed. The land took hold.”

  He leaned his head against the wall.

  “Once near the ’Nam/Laos border, I saw the Mekong River rise up like a filthy monster, taking in the country in one gulp. It swallowed paddies, villages, took cattle, entire forests. Afterward, there was nothing, just miles of mud that hardened in the sun. For weeks, families squatted over what had been their shacks, just staring at the mud. Except when we dropped shells on them, they forgot about the war. I asked a local scout why these people settled so close to the Mekong, right in its flood-path, knowing every year, generation after generation, their houses would be taken, villages obliterated. He turned to me, this skinny little bloke, and said, ‘We must allow the river.’”

  Simon shook his head. “There’s a saying over there: ‘Beware of logic.’”

  “We believe that, too.” She spoke slowly, thoughtfully. “Logic is a haole concept, we’ve always been suspicious of it. That’s why we still follow the mystics. I think I chose the field of law and logic out of pure perversity.”

  He pulled her head gently to his shoulder, favoring his wounded arm. “You’re not perverse, Vanya. You’re a woman with an almost palpable need to offer herself up to life. Though life will never measure up to you.”

  As they talked he saw her life as it had been, would be: a blind leap repeated and repeated, the taut line of her trajectory lingering on his retina.

  As if reading his mind, she said, “I’m sorry I’m not another kind of woman, that I dragged you into this. You don’t belong here. Like Toru, you’ve already fought your wars.”

  “Don’t go all metaphysical on me, sweetheart. No, I wouldn’t have chosen this. But I’ll tell you something most men can’t admit—being a soldier is much easier than being a man. Now get some sleep, it’s almost time.”

  She closed h
er eyes, then looked up again. “Simon. That roadblock was for us. They’re tracking us, aren’t they?”

  “They’re tracking something. Or maybe not. I’ve lost touch with intuition.”

  At six A.M., they stood and stretched, and moved outside. Lloyd, eerily alert, took the wheel of the car and they drove slowly down a road still empty of traffic. It took them through small towns which residents had been forced to evacuate. Drillers at a nearby geothermal well had hit a hot spot at 3,500 feet causing an eruption of hydrogen sulfide steam. Backup systems to prevent the blowout failed; hydrogen sulfide emissions poured down on villages, even on fishermen at sea. The second such blowout in a year, it left locals with respiratory ailments, nausea, infants unable to digest food. Developers of the $100 million plant refused to close down the wells, and families who had lived there for generations now faced forced relocation.

  Vanya rolled down her window, gagging. “Gas still in the air. Smells like rotten eggs.”

  “One more blowout,” Lloyd said, “maybe folks begin to die. Why dey do dis to us? Why?”

  “Because we’re pau,” she said softly. “Vanishing like the Cheyenne and the Sioux.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they passed the turnoff where the geothermal plant was located. Signs identifying the plant had been removed.

  “Couple miles down dat road,” Lloyd said, “is fences, triple barbedwire. Guards patrol.” He looked at his watch. “Soon time.” Then he turned the car around and swung right at the turnoff, driving slowly. “You look for funny tree, look like sideswiped by car. Dat where we turn into da field.”

  “In broad daylight?”

  “Guards changing now. No pay attention. T’ink only be trouble at night.”

  Of many trees along the road, they spotted one whose bark was stripped and ragged, raw green skin shining through. Lloyd swerved, whipped into a field, tall grasses burying the car as it moved forward.

  Vanya closed her eyes and they were girls again. Adolescents running through vast fields of sugarcane, limbs bare against razor-tooth-edged grasses, pricked so many times their arms and legs ran red. She saw them chasing terrified workers through the fields as if they, the blood-red girls, were cane-ghosts, couriers of death. She kept her head down, not wanting to be in this moment. She wanted to step over it, throw bombs, not deliver them. Not be resigned to courier, accomplice in the back seat of a car. It seemed so ignoble, so second-rate.

  Lloyd drove straight on until they saw the fence. He slowed, stuck his head out, made a funny chirp-chirp sound. Twelve feet ahead, a bush parted, a man in guard uniform lay on his stomach. Simon and Vanya opened their doors, slid to the ground, crawling, pushing the bag before them. The “guard” thrust bushes aside, showing a large hole cut through the triple barbed-wire fence. For a second he and Simon whispered, the gym bag between them, then he pushed it through the fence, and squirmed in after it.

  By the time they reached the car, Lloyd had executed a quiet U-turn. Then they were moving again, tall whispering grass caressing metal as they passed. Slumped behind the two men, Vanya felt enormous pressure in her bladder, tension in her so palpable, she felt her brain cleave to the roof of her skull. At any moment, her eyes would explode, squirting adrenaline.

  Simon checked his watch. “All right. How do we get clear of here?”

  “Back to parkin’ lot where we come off da lava,” Lloyd said softly. “Dere we pick up Route 130 take us up Hilo way. Moah bettah we take long way home, coast road ’round de island.”

  Simon leaned forward, fiddled with the radio. “Almost six-thirty. If those boys made it up to Halenani Hotel, something should be happening soon.” There was nothing, only static. Eyes flying left and right, he snapped the radio off.

  Overhead trees were coming to life, thousands of mynahs in loud oration. In a field, a boy galloping lopsided on an albino mule. Adagio of young priests rounding the corner of a church, holding down their skirts like girls. Merchants opening their road stands, fruit like clustered jewels. Black cat loping down the highway, a thoroughbred trotter. Gray stain of a dead mongoose on asphalt. They sensed these things, saw them, heard them, in unsullied rawness of new morning—yet they saw, heard nothing, their minds absorbed with fleeing.

  Simon’s left arm hurt, he felt deep cuts pulsing, blood dripping through rag. “Christ, I must have banged it.” He thought of the man lying in the grass, waiting for the bag. “Would he squeal? If he got caught?”

  Lloyd looked at him, cursed softly. “Man, you piss me off. I wonda’ why Vanya wit’ someone like you.”

  Simon shook his head. “Sorry, Lloyd. You’re all right. You saved our butts last night.”

  “Bullshit. You t’ink we like blowin’ up our homeland? In old days, we fight for honor, now we fightin’ to survive. Dat Navy guy, my cousin, real intelligent, should be professor kine, role model for our kids. Look Vanya, draggin’ bombs, when should be in courtroom makin’ high-tone speeches. Don’ patronize me, man.”

  They drove in silence, passing a bakery, smell of morning coffee, malasadas.

  “I gotta take a leak, or die,” Lloyd said.

  He pulled into the parking lot already crowded with tour buses come to view destruction. People milled round, changing shoes, checking water jugs, guides bracing to take them across the lava. Lloyd headed for the trees. Simon and Vanya stepped from the car, stretching their limbs like children. He cursed as blood escaped the filthy bandage, running down his arm. Bending to wipe it on his pants, he noticed a haole in aloha shirt eyeing him. The man moved from the crowd and, almost casually, approached.

  “Fishing?” He grinned and pointed at Simon’s arm.

  “Yeah,” Simon said. “Damned moray eel. Nothing serious.”

  As the man continued to advance, Simon picked up the scent of Old Spice. His hair crew cut, his face smooth shaven, all edge and clarity. He knew the type. He glanced at the man’s waist, where his aloha shirt, worn outside his pants, covered bulk, possibly a handgun. Intuitively, without the slightest eyeball movement, Simon knew there were two of them. Then he saw the second man, tall ambler in a dream, moving in slowly from the left. He almost felt sorry for them, wanted to tell them no one wore aloha shirts these days, except cashiers and tourists.

  Some subliminal change in him, a sudden inhalation, registered with Lloyd and Vanya. They slid back into the car.

  “Live here?” One of them asked carefully.

  “Maybe.” Simon smiled, a mean smile. “What are you boys up to?”

  The shorter man waved nonchalantly toward the crowds. “Oh, lava.”

  “Well.” He moved toward the car. “Take it slow, mates.”

  The tall one moved forward. “Say, mind if we ask a few questions . . . ?”

  Simon’s expression changed. “Who in hell are you?”

  The man reached toward his pocket, or maybe he was reaching for his gun. In that moment the other man bent down, looking in the car. Simon’s knee shot upward, connecting with a crotch. His elbow shot out, slamming into the other’s jaw. Lloyd gunned out of the parking lot, car door swinging back and forth like a damaged wing.

  In the back seat, Vanya lunged at him. “You fool! They were just tourists.”

  “Shut up.” He twisted round beside her, scanning the rear window. His gun was in his hand, his face looked awful.

  “That’s all we need!” she cried. “We were doing fine, just fine.”

  Lloyd half turned from the steering wheel. “Vanya, dey wasn’t tourists. I seen dere guns.”

  She stared, dropped her face in her hands.

  “Bleeders were too curious.” Simon tucked his gun back inside his pants. His arm throbbed. His head. The woman beside him was frightened. He loved her, and had not taken care of her. “Sweetheart, I know those men, that type.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Intelligence. Narc boys. Whatever. Those bombs could blow any minute, and we’re standing there passing the time of day with Feds!”

  They drove in silence
until they heard, somewhere in the distance, a series of explosions. Lloyd hit the brakes involuntarily, then speeded up.

  Vanya moaned, bent forward rocking. “I need a rest room. Bad.”

  They pulled behind an ancient diner, used the rest rooms, picked up food and coffee. At 7:20 Lloyd came back from a pay phone, his face absolutely white.

  “Dey blew, man. Dey blew. All hell break loose!”

  Simon dropped his head, exhaling loudly.

  “My cousin tell me get north of Hilo quick. He goin’ underground foah now. No can call him anymore.”

  He drove fast, coffee jazzing up his veins. At the intersection for Hilo Airport they counted four squad cars spreading out behind them stopping traffic on both sides of the highway. The light turned red. They stared straight ahead, and prayed until the light turned green.

  Lloyd swung down Banyan Drive, past smart hotels on Hilo Bay. “We follow de bay till it become Highway 19 North. Den we home free. Foah now.”

  They cruised along for ten or fifteen minutes, then unaccountably Lloyd braked, pulling over to the curb.

  “What are you . . . ?”

  He studied his rearview, put his hand up to silence them. Three cars behind him, a slate-gray Honda pulled over to the curb. He waited several minutes, pulled into traffic again. The Honda followed, keeping several cars behind. Very casually, Lloyd turned down a quiet street. He’d driven half a block when the Honda turned into the street behind him. He accelerated, made a quick right, shooting a Stop sign. The Honda speeded up, and shot the sign.

  “Simon. Somebody tailin’ us.” He sped down narrow streets of Chinatown, making random lefts and rights. “Try look see who.”

  Thrown side to side, Simon steadied himself and looked behind them, pulling out his gun.

  “Those clowns from the parking lot!”

  Lloyd ran a red light, cursing. A woman screamed and seemed to throw small children in the air, a bag of Oriental dolls. Trapped behind a sanitation truck, the Honda lost them. The long, low blare of horns.

  “We can’t go north,” Simon said. “They might have radioed ahead.”