Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  Vanya sat forward. “We can’t backtrack. There’s no way out but Saddle Road.”

  Lloyd hit the brakes, coming to a full stop. “No way. Moah bettah go to jail.”

  “It’s our only chance.”

  He threw up his hands. “Nobody drive it. Fog, rain. Kapu! Dey lift our car up, put us down in hell!”

  Simon stared at him as if he’d lost his senses. “What’s he babbling about? What is it?”

  She shook her head. “Saddle Road . . . shortcut across the island that skirts the slopes of Mauna Kea. Scientists stay at the observatories at the top.”

  Lloyd shouted at her. “Nobody drive it! Even scientists take helicopters to da top.”

  Vanya sighed. “It’s the Night Marchers. He’s afraid.”

  “Ghosts? Is that what he’s afraid of?” Simon jumped from the back seat, yanked Lloyd’s door open, shoved him over, and took the wheel. “Now, just direct me to this damned Saddle Road.”

  Following her directions, he accelerated through residential streets of Hilo that quickly became outskirts, then chilly, damp brush country. The road so far was paved and decent, but the landscape on either side turned gray as if covered with wet fungus.

  “Lava flow,” Vanya explained. “From the 1800s. Nothing grew back. They say the area’s cursed.”

  It wasn’t the rich black lava of the night before. Beneath gray suedelike growth on scant vegetation there were only solidified rivers of more gray. The air cooled noticeably as they began to climb. The road deteriorated, asphalt crumbling to potholes. Lloyd sat shaking, his head hanging, refusing to look out the window.

  Simon glanced at him. “A grown man afraid of bloody ghosts!” He reared back as a large hunk of lava hit the hood. And then another. “What the ... where did that come from!”

  Lloyd screamed and covered his face as Vanya leaned forward, gripping Simon’s shoulder. “That’s what he meant. They don’t want us here. It’s their place.”

  A ball of gray filth seemed to whirl in from the left, splintering Simon’s window. He struggled as the car swerved and teetered on its side, then hit the brakes and stopped dead still. Picking glass from his lap, he flung open the door and stood there yelling.

  “You bleeders think I’m afraid of you!” Waving his gun at the foggy void. “I come from Abo, the Kakadu! We invented the spirit world. We invented you!” He waved the gun again and there was only silence.

  It grew colder, as if they were entering autumn. Fog settled on the windshield like wet hair. Hitting a massive pothole, the car skidded. Simon cursed, spun the wheel, kept going. A solitary tree of gray fungus rose against the landscape like a dripping phantom and, through the splintered pane, the smell of decay, as if something hideous were sitting beside them, wrapping its arms round them. Lloyd whimpered, hid his face with his shirt. They crept along with almost no visibility. Rain came down, pelting them, an awful sulfur smell.

  Simon slowed, hearing the wind, was it the wind? a moaning, almost a weeping sound, then shrieks, subhuman shrieks. His headlights picked up patches of fog shaped like moving humans. They spun away, ran forward, threw themselves against the car.

  Lloyd cried, “Oh, Jesus, Mary, Joseph . . .”

  “Godawful, bloody island,” Simon shouted. “Why do you people stay? I mean, what is here worth saving?”

  He was aware by Vanya’s silence how that remark had cut. And he thought of her side of the island, the Kona side. Soft showers draping steep-sided valleys, drifting through banana and papaya groves, then turning into hard legs of rain that marched down to the sea and were resurrected as rainbows, like bright spent but implacable warriors climbing up the hills toward home, and flooded taro patches iridescent in sun, and lotus fields like heads of newborns, and smoke of poignant little cooking fires coming up the hills, and dusk, a certain moment when everything turned into fiction, him startled like he was startled now, remembering the first night she brought him to the house, roads gleaming sacrificial-red from coffee cherries, and coming up the drive, smell of fertilizer, soil, coffee, ginger, guava, flowers exploding all about in Gypsy-colors, the house so white, so old, so definite, enfolding this high-strung mournful feverish clan.

  . . . What is it like I wonder to be so connected? Is it what I feel for that massive bulge in the Outback, Uluru? And mobs of rose-breasted galahs dragging their colors up the geometry of the rock, and how I feel when staring in the distance at pitch and yaw of lolloping kangaroos, and out beyond Perth an azure sea, and then that moment sun going, all of nature, everything rinsed into amethyst, improbable color, pure fiction, maybe everything is fiction . . .

  “Simon!” She grabbed his shoulder from behind, waking him from a half-sleep.

  “No one can drive in this soup,” he muttered.

  “That’s how it takes you,” she said. “The fog swallows everything. People, cars just disappear. We have to stay awake.”

  She looked at Lloyd snoring softly, and seeing his head relaxed and drooped, she felt unutterable exhaustion, trying to remember when last she had slept.

  “About two more miles, there’s a hunting cabin. We’ll rest an hour, and start again. No one could follow us out here.”

  The place was dismal, a one-room shelter of damp wood, no windows, no door, no electricity, a corpse of something in the fireplace. A wooden box nailed to the wall with crumbling, yellowed forms asked hunters to list what game they had killed. BOAR. SOW. FERAL RAM. FERAL EWE. FERAL BILLY. And what game birds. QUAIL. PHEASANT. TURKEY. DOVE.

  Amazed that they were still alive, Lloyd seemed to come to his senses. Gathering rags and sticks from a corner, he lit a match, sat huddling at the fire. “Can’t stay here long, too cold. Simon, how de arm?”

  He frowned, unwrapped the bloody bandage. Skin on his forearm all lacerated, above the elbow two large gashes. It hurt, but not as much as it should have.

  “You know why no infection?” Lloyd said, looking pleased. “Kukui oil, good medicine for skin. Kānaka rub on dere bellies, rub everywhere. Bandage from my T-shirt full of it!”

  “Thanks, mate.” Simon clenched, unclenched the hand of the injured arm. “Bit stiff, and it’s my shooting arm.” He slid the Walther from under his shirt, checked the magazine, snapped it shut as Vanya knelt, wrapping his wound with a strip of her shirt.

  “Now rest,” she said. “One hour, then we go.”

  The men curled up on their sides. She lay facing them and closed her eyes, images dancing behind her eyelids. All-night flight across black lava. Figures like air-crash victims flung across the land. Fireworks. Explosions. Two strangers in a car, pursuing. Bombs blew. And what did they accomplish? Will it make a difference? How many more before we make a difference? As soon as she heard them snoring, she sat up cautiously, taking the gun from Simon. Then she slid into a corner, and propped herself against the wall.

  Now, she let sleep come, there was nothing left to fight it. But it was the sleep of a woman with something lethal in her lap, like sleeping with a puff adder, so that an inner eye remained alert. In her half-sleep she drooled, the weight in her hand becoming the weight of food she was carrying to her mouth. She smelled laulau and twice-fried rice. Poi. And squid. She could taste the squid, hear oil popping in the skillet. She woke, heard something crunching on gravel, like things deep-frying. Rain. Again, she slept, dreams ebbing and flowing, like figures passing through a door.

  One of the figures bent over Simon with a gun. “Easy. Slow . .. and . .. easy. Put your hands above your head. Now, turn over on your stomach.” He leaned down, frisking him.

  The other one waved his gun in Lloyd’s face, his hand between Lloyd’s legs. Locating a hunting knife, the man started withdrawing it from a slender sheath sewn in the inner thigh of Lloyd’s jeans. Lloyd grunted, did something funny with his leg, the haole tumbled back. In that instant, Simon rolled away from the other.

  “Don’t do it,” the man yelled. “I’ll shoot!”

  Simon kept rolling toward the doorway. The man half squatted
, aiming with both hands. Walls reverberated with the shot. A piece of doorway splintered and he aimed again.

  Later, she would think it was his posture that repulsed her, lethal, premeditated. Vanya stood and sighed, lifted both arms, her finger on the trigger, squeezing, squeezing in the rueful certainty that this act made everything irreversible. Her arms exploded in their sockets. Deaf, she was flung against the wall. The cabin lit up with the shot, and in the brightness, he spun, surprised, dismayed, trying to speak, but some vital element within was breaking down. He seemed to kneel, looked at his gun, then up at Vanya, his lips lax, eyes blank, expression fading like bright colors of a hooked fish.

  Simon came up behind him, tipped him over with his foot. He fell forward, the back of his aloha shirt petalled out and crimson.

  Across the room, his partner sprawled, Lloyd spread-eagled over him, gun in one hand, knife in the other.

  The man stared at Vanya, disbelieving. “Lady, you just shot an agent of. . .”

  Lloyd struck him in the face with the gun, then pushed the barrel up his nose, speaking quietly. “Now it yoah turn. Haole.”

  Simon crossed the room in long strides, took the gun from Lloyd, and dragged the man to his feet. “Your lucky day. We’re going to let you live.” He shoved him outside, pushed him into the trunk of the Hyundai. “You start yelling, even dare to think of it, they’ll find your entrails down the road.”

  The man folded himself into the trunk, holding his bleeding face. Inside the cabin, no one moved. The man on the floor seemed to be sleeping. Very carefully, Simon took the gun from Vanya and held her by the hand.

  “Simon.” Lloyd seemed half angry, half in shock. “Why you let de ot’er live? He bring da cops ...”

  “He is the cops. If I waited one more minute, you’d have wasted him.”

  “Dat’s right. Look dis one, he try shoot you.”

  Simon shook his head. “Lloyd, listen to me. You’ve still got a chance to get out of this without killing somebody. Once you do that, take that step ...”

  He gazed at Vanya, standing next to him and yet a long way away from him. She was suddenly a long way away from everything. He moved to the body, bent down to touch it.

  “He dead,” Lloyd whispered. “Real dead. What we do now?”

  “We run. Alone. It’s bad for you to be with us.”

  “No, man. I stick it out wit’ you. Find some place to hide.”

  Vanya murmured something.

  “What, sweetheart?”

  Her voice was very small. “Waipi‘o . . .”

  “Yeah,” Lloyd cried. “Da valley. Jungles, caves, plenny old-timers help us. Outsiders kapu. Not even U.S. Army find us.”

  “All right, then get us there.” Simon looked out the door. “We take their car, then you ditch it, chuck it in the sea. Then get back to your boys.”

  “But, Simon . . .”

  “Don’t worry, that bloke could never make you in a lineup. The cabin was dim. You’d be just another kanaka.”

  Lloyd shook his head defiantly, and Simon grabbed him.

  “Don’t you get it? It’s all over for her. We’re fugitives now.”

  Lloyd glanced at Vanya and what was on her face so chilled him, he began to understand. He started the engine as Simon slid into the back with her, not talking, knowing the futility of words to one in shock. He put his arm round her and she looked at him with an expression he had never seen in another human. He had only seen it in wild animals at full gallop. Then her eyes changed; all of a sudden the idea that he existed here beside her entered her mind. He pulled her head against his shoulder, held her tight.

  Geography had formed him, the Outback, space so limitless it left some men insatiable for human commerce, left others silent, perverse. That perversity simmered for years within him, so Simon found himself outside society, committed to nothing and no one except a fraternity of assassins. One day, in an ecstasy of betrayal, retaining the right not to belong, not to be accountable, he abandoned that fraternity, became again a man outside everything.

  He rode the years alone, and there was nothing. He searched for an Absolute, some force, some thing that would not incorporate, not easily be solved. He went back to the Aborigines, the mystics, who knew where they were going. But years had intervened, now they scraped their sticks across the land and slowly died. Simon went his way again, and saw her.

  There was her telling posture, proud, and when she turned to him, something broken in the eyes. That so impersonal and animalistic a dignity should be allied with so poignantly human a sensitivity, stilled him. His first thought was not possession of her, but rather, She will teach me something. She is my apprenticeship. Now they were running side by side, and he ran with the reconcilable knowledge that here was something he would not betray. He would save her by going under with her.

  Very subtlely, the land changed as they moved west. A lessening of that gray fungus pelting everything, a few more trees, sunshot fog, a coming green. Still, the air was damp and cold, the road hellish, hairpin turns, potholes. Lloyd twisted his head left and right, looking for Night Marchers, but he no longer flinched when hunks of lava hit the car, whirling as if thrown. Having witnessed how totally a bullet could eradicate a human—how swiftly it stopped all the inner sluicings and murmurations—the moody spirits of this landscape seemed harmless, all knife-flash and no blood.

  “Simon,” he said, “maybe I come visit you when t’ings cool down. Old-timers in Waipi‘o guarding bunch our crates. Whooo, what a bitch dat was, sliding guns, explosives, down da mud at night.” He studied him in the rearview. “What you folks goin’ do? Live dere forevah? Vanya real kalaima now, foah shoah.”

  “We’ll take it slow.” He gazed down at her. “Very slow indeed.”

  She stirred, dug down in her pocket, poured from a small pouch a perfect sphere, a large, glittering black pearl. She stared, as if willing it to speak, then held it up against her cheek.

  “Waipi‘o?” she whispered.

  “We’re on our way.”

  “Then ... what happens ... ?”

  “Nothing, sweetheart. Everything has happened.”

  ‘Awa

  * * *

  The Tea for Curing Grief

  RAGGED PLUMES OF STUTTERED SPEECH held between clenched teeth. He struggled like something being born, hands moving erratically, one scratching, one knitting. The bed seemed draped in billowing white skin and underneath therein, the mummy coming back to life. They braced themselves, ignoring the odor, fetid, something just short of serious disease.

  For fifty-four hours Run Run had sat there with a loaded gun. Twice he had moaned, swimming to the surface, and twice she had tried giving him more knockout drops. Trussed, bound in winding sheet, only one-quarter conscious, he did not, could not, swallow.

  She pleaded with Jess. “Do it. Wit’ da needle.” And she watched. Mot’er God, I nevah t’ought I see again a needle goin’ in his arm.

  Jess was professional and calm. A beautiful decorum in the way she held the needle to the light, then pierced him. Afterward she stood alone and sobbed, imagining his junkie years, Toru hooked, like a fish.

  Now the awful, prodigious resurrection. “... water ...”

  Jess lifted the mosquito net, and then his head, bringing a cup to his mouth. He drank slowly, eyes traveling her face.

  “. . . feel awful .. . what happened . . . ?”

  She looked across the room.

  “Tell him!” Run Run said. “Wha’ can he do but kill me.”

  He twisted, looked down at his body, the fouled sheet, burn of ropes round his wrists. He thrashed wildly, tossing his head side to side, the movement freeing odors, urine, worse.

  “. . . get me out ... of this . . .”

  The shock. Residue of drugs. He fell back into sleep.

  “I smell like shit.” Now he was fully awake.

  Run Run and Jess approached the bed, silently threw back the net. Both looking very old, they came at him with scissors.
<
br />   “What time is it?”

  “Amost midnight.”

  “What day?”

  “January first.”

  His face blue-gray, frenzied in defeat. He sobbed. They snipped and snipped. Sheets, pads, mattress, everything would have to be burned.

  Arms freed, he tried to grab Run Run by the throat. “I’ll kill you, filthy bitch!”

  “Yeah,” she seemed exhausted. “First you bathe. Den you can beat me to deat’.”

  They sat him up slowly, then Jess ran his bath, her expression strange, a curious lack of emotion. Toru sat sobbing in the tub, cursing them while Run Run soaped him down. Then shakily, he stood, showering, rinsing all of it, all the unlived, medicated hours, down the drain.

  She wrapped him in a towel, sat him in a chair. “Try wait. I bring you food. You get up yet, you gonna faint.”

  He lashed out at her with his foot. “Why? Why? People were counting on me . . .” He dropped his head and cried again, somewhat dopey and confused.

  She came back with a tray of food. Toru grabbed it and slid down to the floor, eating with his hands like a mendicant.

  “You’re never gonna see me again. Never! You made me look like a coward.”

  Silently, Run Run bent to take the tray, her lack of expression infuriating him.

  He threw the tray across the hall, and slapped her face. “Are you deaf? You have made me a girl!”

  She staggered back, slid herself along the wall. Something was wrong with her, no response, no emotion whatsoever.

  Jess called up the stairs. “Run Run, the news again.”

  She looked at Toru. “Yeah. I deserve yoah hate. But first, come look da TV, so you know.”

  Television cameras scanned wreckage of a storage building, housing drilling equipment for a geothermal plant in Puna District. Bomb damage to the plant itself was negligible.

  Then, the face of a reporter broadcasting from another location. “In a perhaps-related incident, a bomb blast here at the Halenani Resort Complex early this morning was responsible for the destruction of a swimwear boutique and the loss of a staff member’s hand. Another bomb, a dud, was found inside the office of Dr. Rebirth, a so-called Cranial-Sacral Therapist who offers seminars in what the hotel calls its Polynesian Temple of Love. Scrawled across the walls was the message: HERE IS OUR KINE LOVE TO YOU. HULA”