Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  “I’d pay anything,” Rachel said. “A chopper could lift them out of there at night. Get them to a seaplane. Australia. Singapore. Anywhere she wants to go.”

  Jess shook her head. “She’s doing it her way. And in her time ...” She didn’t mean to say the other thing, didn’t know she said it until she looked at Rachel’s face. “... if she’s still alive.”

  Saying it, she walked out on the lawn and vomitted.

  Ban came from Thailand, and spent weeks on the farm with his sisters. They were like three children who had been badly tortured, then released, allowed to walk away and live. Sometimes they stood very still, the three of them, as if listening, waiting to be sucked backwards into that past life. Sometimes the older girl jumped from her bed, stood panting in Rachel’s room in blackness, until her form emerged. She moved close, listened to her breathing, touched her face. Comforted, the girl went back to bed.

  “I’ve sent him to medical school. He’s going to be a surgeon.” Proud, maternal, Rachel watched Ban stroll in sunlight, slender and graceful as a woman. “He’s helping me bring out more girls.”

  “Where do you get the nerve?” Jess asked. “You’re dealing with criminals.”

  Rachel leaned forward, trying to explain. “It’s strange. You offer people enough money, they become almost . . . genteel. Besides, these men know who I am. They know Ban was Hiro’s ‘son.’”

  They walked the fields arm in arm, Jess with a sense of weight lifted, burdens shared, a sense of Rachel’s strength. She understood part of that strength came from Rachel’s sudden wealth. Money now gave her mobility and speed—she cut through the trivial, the time-devouring, sliced right to the heart of what she needed.

  “Never underestimate money,” she said. “It gives a woman privacy, insulates you from the daily dross. You don’t have to be anybody’s darling. You get to choose your company. Or choose to be an outcast. And, yes, it gives you power. People listen.”

  Now when she wasn’t with her girls, she spent time in Honolulu meeting with officials coffined in dark rooms, men from Immigration, the Health Department, the U.S. Embassy, eliciting their assistance in helping her bring more young girls out of Chiang Mai.

  One day, just back from Honolulu, she called Jess to her room. In her hand was a tiny book, a diary with gold covers. Inside were pages of almost-transparent lengths of jade thin as eyelids, to which were attached sepia silk parchments embossed with delicate spidery inscriptions in gold lettering. The diary of an Empress from the Ming dynasty, almost five hundred years old, on certain pages the golden ghosts of empress fingerprints.

  “Do you recognize it, Jess?”

  She shook her head, then leaned closer. And it came stealthily, a memory of the two of them, nine or ten, sliding into Pono’s room consumed with curiosity. Rifling through her things, they had found the diary with a faded inscription on the back. Now Jess turned it over. “Volume I. For Kelonikoa, from Rostov Anadyr, 1873.” Another untellable mystery from Pono’s past.

  “One day,” Rachel said, “after she brought Grandfather home, I remembered the diary, and asked about it. Pono told me Kelonikoa, our great-great-great grandmother, was a renowned Tahitian beauty, that this was a gift from a Russian who had loved her. But she was married to our one-eyed ancestor, Mathys Coenradtsen.”

  Rachel put her hand to her temple as if to ward off pain.

  “The evening of that last night, the night I saw their car go down the drive, Pono brought me the diary, said it was for us. To sell if we needed to. In those days that followed, I forgot about it. It’s been here all this time.”

  They studied the Empress’s journal.

  “I wonder what she wrote,” Rachel whispered. “What the words mean.”

  Jess hesitated, and when she spoke her voice seemed to come from long distances, across the years, the generations.

  “Perhaps she wrote that life is really lived through dreams and intuitions, not fate and circumstance. That the love most longed for actually exists, elsewhere, on another plane.”

  Jess thought of Duke and Pono, how they had lived life on the grandest scale in their imaginings. And she thought of her mother, and Rachel’s, one barely known, one never glimpsed. Her eyes filled and her cheeks were wet.

  “I know.” Rachel sighed. “I still look for her in every wrinkled face. I’ve looked for her so long, in a way I’ve become my mother. As you became yours, Jess. In coming home, you brought her home. They’ve earned the right to peace.”

  In September, when school began, Rachel took her girls back to the house in Kahala, outside Honolulu. On weekends they sat quietly while she schooled them in calligraphy, wanting them to learn certain graces Hiro had instilled in her. And sometimes they sat in the teahouse in kimonos, Rachel instructing them in the traditional tea ceremony. Behind her on the wall, the sun beheld an eerie landscape under glass, like a spread-out mounted deerskin. It glowed, the blue of old tattoos.

  Now, there were new rumors. People organizing in Waipi‘o Valley. Skirmishes with troops of soldiers. Shots exchanged. Guerillas dragged their dead back into the jungle, so they couldn’t be identified. Across the Big Island, folks whispered of a woman shot through the head. If it was Vanya, Jess suspected they would never know. The underground had to keep her name alive, what she symbolized. She and Toru sat on beaches, rocking back and forth, the pounding surf muffling their broken sobs.

  One day Run Run stumbled in the kitchen, grabbing her chest. Jess thought it was her heart, that she had heard of Vanya’s death. Run Run shook her head, staring with eyes that seemed half shaded with tiny shells of mother-of-pearl.

  “No can see no moah. Eyes all comin’ murky. Ah, keiki, maybe I goin’ blind foah all my sins.”

  During the cataract operation of Run Run’s left eye, Toru paced the clinic corridor, trembling like a child. They brought her home bandaged like a blind thing, and he held her head while Jess administered drops of medication. A month later, after the operation on her right eye, Jess held her head while Toru administered the drops.

  “What dis mean?” Run Run asked softly. “Maybe you forgive me for tie you up, keep you from bombin’ t’ings?”

  “I never forgive,” he answered just as softly, patting her cheek like a dear thing.

  Now Run Run was like a child, dashing all about, discovering things. “Colors, ooh, many colors. T’ings I not seen foah yeahs! Ooh, look da pots shinin’ in da sun. Look da frangipani! Jess, you goin’ gray!”

  She calmed down, turning serious. She looked across the fields.

  “Life been long, Jess. It come at me in blows. I look my left eye, see me and Pono sacrificin’ youth, blood, to dis earth, dese orchards. Den I look my right eye, see you and Toru plantin’, weedin’, harvestin’. Like you washin’ our faces, trimmin’ our hair, keepin’ our blood fresh in da soil.”

  She sighed, pumped out her chest. “You see da place I sit each day, watchin’ Toru build his house? Dat spot on da hill look down his ten acres? I like be buried dere. Right dere! So I watch dat boy for all eternity, drive him pupule.”

  Run Run moved slower now, saying less, eating less. Each day, she sat in her little niche atop a hill that rolled down to orchards, then the sea, grinning, holding her knees like a girl, watching the son of her dead son, building, going on. Jess knew one day by and by they’d find her there, head bowed, washed by rain, cured by sun, hardened to a little icon.

  One stormy, sleepless night she found Toru in Vanya’s bedroom, reverently touching her things. “Tūtū’s dying. Vanya’s probably dead. We’re disappearing, Jess.”

  Viciously, she whacked at his foot with her walking cane.

  “Are you a man? Build your house! Plant your seed! Get on with living.”

  She didn’t tell him she had dreamed. A corpse. A faceless corpse. Now her nights seemed haunted. One day soon, Run Run would be gone, Toru would marry, maybe Rachel would disappear in some estuary of the Mekong, rescuing her Chiang Mai girls. She suddenly didn’t care about
the wheel Run Run had envisioned, of which she, Jess, was the hub, the center of so many lives. The wheel was flying apart, everyone was abdicating. She moved about with a surety of purpose, instructing workers with kinetic calm, but in the evenings she sat alone, feeling larval and exposed.

  When Lee Sugai introduced her to attractive men, men of ethics, reverence for the land, Jess panicked, felt she wasn’t ready. She thought of Pono and Duke and how for sixty years their love had been based on some enigmatic will to believe in the impossible: that someday they would walk together out into the world. Their story meant miracles existed, it meant that conceivably, in some future time, someone—perhaps a little weathered, a little creased, but of large interior resources—would walk her way with momentous inevitability. Jess would be waiting, watching for clues. If he didn’t come, she would track him down.

  She called Rachel in Honolulu, needing to shore up her resolve.

  “I want a life of human exchange. I don’t want years of empty nights filled with trivia ...”

  Rachel sighed. “There’s a lot to be said for trivia. And, what is night, really, but release from all those weird combinations it takes to get through a day. The important half of life is just beginning, Jess! We have to be discriminating about who we allow into our nights.” She paused, seemed to drift, thinking of Hiro. “As for love, who can survive more than one great passion? Who would want to.”

  “Did you really love him, Rachel?”

  “There were things between us ... diabolical, unspeakable. But Hiro shielded me from life, kept me from throwing myself away. He kept me from dying, there were times I didn’t care.” She closed her eyes. “Yes, he was evil. It’s possible to love, with the greatest love, that which is evil. When I first saw him I knew if I stayed with him, nothing could ever hurt me.”

  “Then, what you really wanted was protection.”

  “No! I wanted to be used, used up, forever, over and over. I’ve lost the taste for such delirium.”

  Jess wondered if she was right. Most people sought a blindingly passionate, transcending love, the one impossible and tragic. At the same time they wanted a less perfect, more prosaic love, one that got them through the day-to-day. She brooded over this, wondering if it was age, or just fatigue that took away large appetites, left us desiring a life predictable and kind. Was wanting less the first step down the road to dying, or to wisdom? Pono had said NEED LESS, DESIRE LESS, MOST THINGS AFTER ALL, ARE NOT WORTHWHILE. But, surely physical affection, human companionship, were worth while. Happiness had to depend on more than just ‘āina that threatened to break her back, and ‘ohana that kept deserting her.

  “I keep forgetting we’re Pono’s girls. Maybe we’re not supposed to be happy.”

  “Then we’ll pretend to be,” Rachel said. “We’ll make it a habit, no matter what.”

  That’s all we can do, Jess thought. Live in readiness for whatever comes.

  There was so much to dwell on, as first she didn’t notice the boy hanging round the fields. He was nine or ten, and some days after school, he stood with his bookbag on his shoulders, eating shave-ice, joking with field-workers. He came round so often, he became part of the landscape. Then she forgot him completely, because she dreamed again, a faceless corpse, and woke up screaming for Vanya.

  She drove again to Shark Bay and sat on beaches calling out to Pono, to her aumākua, asking for strength, asking not to be abandoned. One morning, after sitting there all night, she saw them parked between tour buses at the base of Pu’ukohola Heiau. They were still watching her. They would always watch.

  And still the young boy came, seeming to integrate himself with workers and people round the house. One day, sitting at Shark Bay, Jess thought she saw him fishing out on the jetty. She dismissed him, caught up in her life—still making house calls birthing calves, vaccinating steers, taking blood samples from a dozen sows, then the punishing hours of harvesting sometimes straight on through the night.

  Every morning she strode up and down the fields, yelling to workers, whacking bushes with Pono’s cane. And every evening she stood on the loading platform with the foreman counting hundred-pound sacks of coffee cherries. In her fatigue she discovered that leaning on the cane sometimes brought great relief, as if some surging balm were flowing upward, as if another back were taking on her burdens.

  One day, Lena came, golden, lovely, but very troubled. “I am so confused! Toru is no help.”

  “Be patient,” Jess said. “He’s sad because Run Run is getting old.”

  Lena shook her head. “Not just that. It’s Toru’s life, this family. No fathers, too many mothers ... so mixed up, I cannot understand it. How will I tell our children what was what? And who was who?” She went away, despondent.

  Jess gazed after her and thought, I have been a selfish wahine, thinking only of me. Forgetting all the kamali‘i who will come behind us.

  In five years she would be fifty. One day, her child, Anna, would have a child. What could Jess give that child, and Toru’s children? Their children’s children? What would be more valuable than genealogy. She could do that for them, begin the backward journey. Their heirs would have the wealth of history to aim at life, when life aimed at them. She sat down with pen and paper. Where to start? There was still so much she didn’t know. What was truth, conjecture? What was purely myth?

  Did their ancestor Kelonikoa really try to swim home to Tahiti? Had her one-eyed husband Mathys really been a cannibal? Had their children really been stone-eaters, defending Queen Lili‘uokalani? Had Pono really hypnotized wild boar, turned deer into the bark of trees? Did she really resurrect the dead? Had Grandfather Duke really lived outside the world for sixty years? Did he really suffer as a human guinea pig? Did lepers really tango? Had Vanya’s son merely drowned, or was he really murdered? Was Hiro really tattooed head to toe? Had he really been Yakuza? Or just a greedy thug? Had Ming really died from lupus? Or had she died from Dragon Seed? Was Vanya an idealistic revolutionary? Or had she just been born to self-destruct? So much had happened in their lives—or had it? Maybe they were all bit players lost in the knotted fringes of illusion. Even imagining their history was exhausting. Jess put aside the pen and paper.

  Guerillas were still active in Waipi‘o. Surveying crews were shot at near the cliffs surrounding the valley; across the island, bombs still wrecked golf courses and marinas. But now people seemed to be turning their attention to something more important. Sovereignty. Maybe it would happen in this decade. Certainly, it would happen. Forces were gathering. It was under congressional consideration. It was in the air.

  Jess sat at Shark Bay imagining the day they raised the Hawaiian flag again, resurrecting an independent Native Hawaiian nation, with its own separate government, by and for its own Native Peoples. She wondered who she would share that flag-raising moment with. Would she be alone. Christmas approaching now, she wondered how she would get through the holidays. There would only be a house of ghosts.

  One evening at Shark Bay she thought she saw the young boy playing on the sand, the same boy who had hung round her fields. She had not seen him for weeks, and now something was wrong with his face. He had a terrible infection, his nose puffed out like a kukui. Ignoring the signs “WARNING SHARKS IN THESE WATERS,” he seemed to moon along, strolling at the water’s edge. She wondered where he came from, why she kept seeing him, what was wrong with him.

  She eased closer. “Where are you from? Your folks live near by?”

  He smiled, nodding yes.

  “How come I see you at my farm?”

  “Go to school near dere. Got ‘ohana dere. School not so good here. I come home to Kawaihae for Kalikimaka, see parents, brothers, sisters.” He spoke in half Pidgin, half proper English, as if he were vacillating.

  “What’s wrong with your face? Infection?”

  He nodded, looked carefully up the hill behind them.

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  He nodded again, his movements slow, self-conscious. Jes
s sat on the sand puzzled, watching him. Then she was swept back to her own thoughts.

  Casually and very slowly, the boy approached and sat beside her. “Dose pretty girls work your fields in summer? Your daughters?”

  She smiled. “Sort of. Well, my cousin Rachel’s hānai daughters.”

  “Oh.” He pushed sand between his toes. “You got children?”

  It was hard to answer. “A daughter. Far away.”

  “Sad she not wit’ you,” he said softly.

  “She’ll come by and by. I saw it in a dream.”

  He seemed to move closer. He kept his head down, screwing his face like he was working up an awful sneeze. Then he snorted, so awful a sound, Jess turned away.

  “Look,” he whispered. “Please!”

  She turned back to him, and gasped. His nose, mysteriously deflated, looked suddenly normal, uninfected. Jess squinted, looked at him more closely, then pulled back. He was nudging her outer thigh with his hand, his fist. She looked down. The fist opened, and in his small, sandy, pink and humid palm lay something gleaming, shot with colors like electric pulses. A large, perfect black pearl. She screamed.

  He closed his fist. “No! Please. No scream. Man on hill is watching from a car.”

  Tears coursed her cheeks, she couldn’t stop, just sat there shaking, silently sobbing. He took her hand under her skirt, placed therein the pearl. Jess clutched it as if it were a human heart. As long as she clutched it, it would beat. Then she remembered her dreams of a faceless corpse.

  “Vanya!”

  The boy casually looked up the hill, then stood lazily, throwing shells as if he were bored. After a while, he sat down again. They looked out at the sea.

  “Is she alive?”

  He nodded.

  “... Wounded?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Does she need me?”

  “No.” He spoke rapidly now, lips hardly moving. “I watch your place long time, send message back da valley you okay. One day haole pick me up, search bookbag, clothes, even underwear! Think I carrying message. My papa say bettah stop before dey catch me. But word come Vanya going crazy if not reach you by Kalikimaka. I no can carry written message. So dat’s why da pearl, proof to you she still alive. Papa say put up da nose. Look like something contagious, like ma‘i Pākē. Cops search me, I tell them got real bad infection. They no touch my face. Clever, neh?”