by T W Neal
I need to get somewhere private and rinse off. Cars whiz past me along the two-lane road leading into Kapa`a. I look both ways, trying to decide which way to go down the road.
I really have no idea what to do next. I’m dressed for church in a skirt and a scoop neck tee with sandals. I left my purse in the car, and don’t even have a quarter to use a pay phone, even if I knew an adult’s number to call. I could hitchhike, but where?
The gravity of my situation sinks in.
I’m hungry, thirsty, penniless, and have nowhere I can think of going for help.
I’m somewhat close to my school. I’ll walk to the school. I can spend the night in the playground equipment, since tomorrow’s Monday. The plastic tube thing that leads to the slide will keep the elements off, and I can rinse off the buffalo grass allergies with the hose and have water to drink. A night without food will be good for me, and when Monday rolls around, I’ll come out of the bushes and pretend I was dropped off as usual.
I walk and walk—hot, itchy, and miserable. The school building is finally visible in the distance when a familiar van pulls over to the side of the road just in front of me.
Bonny opens the van door with a slide and a bang, and I’ve never been so happy to see her in my life. Our eyes meet and communicate without words how screwed up everything is: but we have each other.
“Get in,” Pop yells from the front seat. “And not another word out of you about this.”
I get in. I don’t say another word about it.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Ghosts and Bad Men
Waiting for school bus pickup at Wainiha store
Age: 14, Wainiha, Kauai, 1979
We eventually get a rental house way out in the Wainiha Valley. An A-frame on stilts at the far end of the valley, the house is buried in a dank mosquito-infested tunnel of hau bush next to a large stream that feeds into the Wainiha River.
It’s cheap enough for us to afford, and there’s a reason. The house doesn’t have electricity, so lights at night end up being a racket from the generator, and the mosquitoes are the worst of anywhere we’ve lived—and from the first day we move in, strange things happen. Stuff is moved. Doors open and shut. Items appear and disappear. I have a constant feeling of being spied upon, especially while showering. One evening, eating vegetable stir-fry over brown rice, Mom says, “I think this place is haunted.”
We all agree and tell each other the weird things that make us think so: the sense of cold in some parts of the house. The feeling of being watched. Weird dreams. Cupboards open when they were closed, or closed when they were open. Missing items that turn up in strange places. The front door left open wide, letting in gouts of vicious mosquitoes, when we’re all so careful about that.
Bonny and I begin to do everything together, including going to the bathroom. We also keep Anita close—we can’t let her out of sight because of the unfenced, powerful stream that runs past the house. She’s only three, and it could carry her away.
Living in the van was almost better.
Each day, Bonny and I walk the long muddy track all the way to the main road to wait by the rusty old red gas pumps by the Wainiha Store for pickup by our carpool—and every afternoon we walk all the way back. It’s weird to be at our old stomping grounds—in a way, I don’t feel like I belong anymore. My time on the Mainland changed me, showed me how small Kauai is, how hard it is to make it here, and that while other places may not be as pretty, they’re more hospitable.
One day, Bonny’s not feeling well and stays home from school, so I make the trek to get picked up alone. I’m dropped off again in the evening, and head up the dirt road toward the house, kicking a green guava down the same potholed, sandy dirt road where I jumped into puddles with Knight so long ago.
I’m looking better since the Mainland. I’ve lost the weight from Santa Barbara and, according to the doctor, I’ve reached my full height at five foot five. Rather than the tall, long-legged build Mom and Bonny inherited from Maga, I’m curvy: my breasts have filled in to a generous 32C, and I inherited Gigi’s small waist and delicate ankles. Wearing my first pair of contact lenses and a new pair of Ditto jeans that make the most of my athletic butt, I put a little sway in my hips as I walk down the dirt road into the jungle, bookbag dangling as I daydream.
If Island School had a prom, I’d wear a flowing strapless dress with a tight waist and blow the guys at school’s minds. I’m such a tomboy. Good ol’ redheaded surfer girl Toby. Maybe they’d see me in a different light in a dress. But there’s no prom . . .
The rumble of an approaching truck interrupts my fantasy, and I move to the side of the road. A mud-spattered pickup truck pulls alongside me, filled with sturdy young local guys and a welded rebar cage full of baying, drooling hunting dogs. Everyone is filthy from a pig hunt that appears to have been fruitless.
The truck slows to a crawl, bumping along the dirt road abreast of me. “Eh, haole girl,” the guy in the passenger seat says. “You like one ride?” He grins, a scary effect.
“No thanks.” I swing my bookbag up and put it on over my shoulder. I wish I hadn’t brushed my hair and swayed my hips. I thought I was all alone.
“You look hot. We think you need a ride to cool off,” says one of the guys says from the back of the pickup. I glance over—there are four of them altogether. “Come on up here and sit with us. We’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
I walk faster. My heart’s thundering. “No thanks. I like walking.”
“So, what, we’re not good enough for you? Stuck-up bitch,” the guy in the back says. He puts his hand on the side of the truck bed, getting up. Tattooed muscles in a thin wife-beater tank bunch as he prepares to jump out and grab me.
I drop my bookbag and leap into the jungle, a leafy mass of Java plum, thick grass and tangled hau bush. I’m fast, and panic makes me faster. I hear them yelling behind me, the dogs barking. I have a terrible image of them letting the dogs out, unhooking their guns off the back of the truck cab, and hunting me down.
I run faster, weaving through the trees until I encounter a stand of hau bush so dense that there’s no way to get through it without climbing, so I climb and crawl until eventually I don’t hear anything from behind me. I scramble up a leaning hau bush trunk the size of my thigh, holding on with my hands and walking with my feet. I get high enough to pop my head through the canopy.
The sky’s dressed in dazzling clouds surrounded by the rugged green-clothed slopes of the valley. Off in the distance, cobalt ocean glitters. It’s the same view I had from Knight’s tree fort all those years ago, only further back in the valley. The view couldn’t be a bigger contrast to the submerged green gloom of the tangled hau bush grove I’ve battled through.
They won’t find me up here, and the dogs can’t reach me. Unless they shoot me, I can’t see them getting me down.
I’m safe for the moment.
I do some meditation as I sit on my high limb, closing my eyes and breathing, trying to decide what to do and when to do it. Thinking about how long it would take for the men to get bored looking for me, waiting for me. I eventually climb down, and, after checking that the coast is clear, retrieve my bag, and run all the way to the house at the very end.
Mom and Pop begin driving us to the bus stop each day after that. Finally, they pull us together for another family confab. Lamplight softens our faces because the generator is too expensive to run.
“Part of our recovery is that we’re not taking any help from your grandparents, and we’re just not making it financially here,” Pop tells Bonny and me. “This house isn’t working out, either. We have to move back to California, where I can at least get a job that pays the bills and there will be good medical care for your mom and the new baby.”
I don’t need a calculator to figure out that we aren’t making it, but I’m sad to leave Island School and have to adjust to another school in California again. I’ve never understood the weird push-and-pull Mom and Pop have going on
with my grandparents, and with Kauai, but I definitely won’t miss living in Wainiha.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Hmong TV
Me holding baby Wendy when she arrives, Isla Vista, California
Age: 14-15, Isla Vista, California, 1979-80
At the Los Angeles airport, Maga eyes my dad without affection and doesn’t hug him. “Hello. The children are welcome,” Maga says, and the distinction is not missed by my parents. She was not, apparently, in favor of my parents getting back together.
“Thanks for giving us a place to land,” Pop says. “We’ll pitch our tent in the yard and get out of your hair as soon as possible.”
“Uh-huh. Let’s get on the road.” There are none of the usual exclamations on our cuteness or how we’ve grown. After all, it’s been less than a year since we wore out our welcome on her living room floor the last time.
The drive to Santa Barbara from L.A. is beautiful, and I lean my face on the window of the Vista Cruiser and watch the coastline roll by. The ocean’s color is translucent green jade, and it smells different in California, kelpy and strong. The hills are velvety golden swells dappled with deep green live oaks, and I enjoy the graceful, lazy circles of the buzzards surfing with updrafts of the valleys.
Pop says we’re going to “stand on our own two feet” and he’ll do “whatever it takes” to provide for us, but the Estate was the last time he actually tried, and even working part-time was more than he could handle. Sober Pop is still moody and irritable, a huge worrier who doesn’t like other people, and now there’s no alcohol or pakalolo to take the edge off.
I don’t understand him. We’re so different. I’m not afraid of challenges, and I’ve already decided that getting an education and working are how I’m going to have a different life than this one. A normal life. Maybe I’ll never be as rich as Gigi and Grandpa Jim, but I’m going to make sure I never have to worry about being homeless, getting washed away in a flood, or where the next meal’s coming from.
And Mom? She’s a hard worker but never pursued anything enough to have marketable skills. Having kids every four or five years is a real handicap for a woman. I won’t fall into that trap. I’m going to stay focused on my goals.
“We’re ba-ack!” I sing out as I throw myself into Nancy’s arms in her room. Now that she’s in high school, it’s stuffed with clothes and the walls are carpeted in football game and dance souvenirs. It smells like bubblegum and popularity, and I stifle a twinge of envy.
“Where’s my Anita?” Nancy exclaims, and my littlest sister, face aglow and green eyes sparkling, launches into Nancy’s arms. They formed a strong bond when we lived here the last time, and are delighted to be reunited.
Bonny comes in for more hugs with Nancy. We turn Nancy’s radio up super loud to the same Bee Gees song that Patricia’s listening to in her room. Patricia’s grown into looking like Cindy Crawford, with just as much style, and she comes out of her inner sanctum to join the party. All of us girls dance around in the living room, singing “Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive, ah, ahhh, ahhh!” while doing John Travolta dance moves.
Maybe coming back to the mainland is exactly what we all need. Maybe we’re finally done with Kauai. Maybe we’ve broken the island’s strange and compelling hold, a hold that has begun to seem as negative to my parents as Gigi and Grandpa Jim’s filthy lucre.
Mercifully, Pop gets a job right away at a hardware store and lumberyard in Santa Barbara, where he works a full forty hours a week cutting wood and helping old ladies find nuts and bolts. We get the cheapest place we can find after a couple of weeks at Maga’s house, an apartment in Isla Vista, the same college town where we lived in a converted garage before.
Our unit is half of a duplex in a small quadrangle completely inhabited by Hmong refugees. The families are packed twelve to a two-bedroom unit, so our family of five in the same amount of space seems luxurious by comparison.
Mom explains how the Hmong are a hill tribe from Vietnam and Laos who helped the United States in the Vietnam War, and this is their reward: coming to America and not being slaughtered by the North Vietnamese.
Bon and I share a trash picked waterbed in one bedroom, Anita sleeps on the couch in the living room, and the new baby will stay in the other bedroom with Mom and Pop. We’ve sold the van coming over to get money for the tickets, and now Pop drives our “new” car, an elderly pistachio-colored Pinto, to work each day.
The hardware store is a nasty adjustment for Pop. He gets home and goes straight to bed, hardly taking a shower, on his first day. The familiar black cloud of depression is thick around him. I hope he’ll get used to it and not fall off the wagon and drink, unable to deal with the stress of full-time work on the Mainland with no surfing.
Mom enrolls Bonny at Isla Vista Elementary where she’s in fifth grade, within walking distance of our apartment, but I’m in ninth grade now and need to go to high school. The closest one is called Dos Pueblos High, and it’s across town in the foothills.
“Take the bus to school and get yourself registered,” Mom says to me. “I’m looking for a job, and I have to take Anita with me.” The pregnancy’s making her tired, and Pop has the car, so we all have to fend, getting ourselves around.
I look up bus routes on a kiosk and wait for one that takes me by the high school’s address. I get on the bus and sit self-consciously, avoiding eye contact with anyone, as the vehicle sways and clacks along. There are a lot of University of California Santa Barbara students on the bus, elderly people, and people riding to work at jobs that require logoed pockets.
I stare out the window at raw new developments peeling back the skin of the earth. Beyond our route, dun hills dotted with olive-green oaks roll into a heat-shimmering distance marked by buzzards and telephone poles. It’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago I was in lush Wainiha, swatting mosquitoes and worrying about rapists and ghosts.
The worlds I’ve occupied feel so different that it’s almost like the plane ride is a transporter device. I spot the sign for the high school, and tug on the cable for a stop.
Hunching my shoulders in a stiff new backpack Gigi bought me, along with stiff new jeans and stiff new Reeboks, I get off the bus and walk up into a big, new, sprawling concrete school decorated with a flagpole on roped-off grass. I’m carrying my birth certificate, immunization record, and my last report card from Island School—all As, of course.
At the office, a clerk looks at me over half-glasses. “You’re registering? Where’s a parent or guardian?”
“They had to work.” I give her confident eye contact, like it’s totally normal for a fourteen-year-old to take a city bus to a high school and register herself. Mom and Pop had their rebellion, running away from their families and going hippie-surfer-druggie in the jungle, but going normal is my rebellion. From now on, I’m going to pretend I’m normal until it’s true.
“Well, I guess you can do that. Okay. Here’s some paperwork they need to sign. Let me look up some classes that aren’t too full.”
She gets me enrolled and prints out a schedule, turning to bawl over her shoulder, “Dawn! New student tour!”
Dawn looks up from a computer at the back of the room. I recognize her face between wings of curling-ironed hair, and she remembers me—I can see it in the way acne-pitted cheeks lift up her glasses in a smile. She takes my schedule from the office lady and glances at it, coming through the flapping half door into the office area. “Toby. I think I knew you at Goleta Valley Junior High.”
“Good to see you again, Dawn.”
Dawn shows me around, and I end up eating lunch with kids I’d known briefly before. My adjustment to “D.P.” as it’s affectionately called, gets off to a good start.
Back at home that evening, we sit down for dinner around a garage-sale Formica table set in the kitchen window. Mom’s made soup and corn bread, and I’m so hungry I go for seconds as we all compare notes from the day. Heading back to my chair, I glance out the plate glass window and
freeze where I’m standing.
Our Hmong neighbors are watching us, clustered three deep, upturned faces illuminated by light spilling out of the window. Their faces are as rapt as if we were a live sitcom. They have shorter stature, wider faces, and narrower tilted eyes than the races I’m familiar with. Most of them are wearing American clothes, but a few of the women are wearing traditional garb: brightly colored fabrics sewn in intricate geometric patterns, worn in padded layers with a high, twisted headdress like a turban on their heads.
“Mom. Pop. Look out the window.”
My parents turn to gaze outside. The Hmong stare back, unabashed. Some of them smile and wave.
There are at least twenty people watching us.
“Why are they staring?” Bonny asks. “It’s rude.”
“Maybe it’s not rude in their culture. Maybe they’ve never seen white people eating before,” Mom says.
“Maybe they’re hungry.” I immediately wish I hadn’t said that because the bowl of soup I’ve just served myself is mostly broth, and it was the last of the pot. We’re the kind of poor right now that’s not truly hungry; it’s just monotonous and consists of staples like rice, cabbage, expired baked goods and no options. Looking out at the overhead light reflecting off of dark eyes fixed on the corn bread, I suspect these people have been a lot hungrier than that.
“Ignore them,” Pop says, with an imperious note in his voice that reminds me of Gigi. He uses the spatula to pry loose another square of corn bread. “Even if they’re hungry, we can’t do anything about it.”
This is true.
We eat all of the soup, and the leftover corn bread gets fried and becomes breakfast the next morning. There are no leftovers to share even if we wanted to—and where to begin? There are so many of them.