Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  Part of me believed him. But part of me didn’t. I left his room like a whipped junkyard poi dog. The feet that were moving my body didn’t feel like my own. My hand that touched the knob was not my own. Maybe he would be exactly what Mom and Dad thought, Hawaiian Superman. Fix the islands and protect our family. It didn’t matter. There was no space there for me.

  Back in my room, on my desk, pre-algebra and life sciences and English in a stack. It wasn’t the only thing I wanted to do, but it was the first thing I saw. I could get B-pluses just by farting. Not good enough, not anymore.

  I started my work.

  Turns out I wasn’t the only one thinking that way, right? Something had changed in Dean after New Year’s, but especially after people started coming around for Noa. Most days Dean would be home just to drop off his backpack, swap his clothes, then he’d be out beating his basketball on the sidewalk, the sound fading away as he went to the court. Sometimes I’d sneak down there, too, follow way behind. On the court he’d be going at high school seniors, guys in college home on break. Him with the basketball bouncing and rocking and shooting under his hand. His dancing knees. He’d take the ball and drive right at their chests, like a bull in a ring, like the pictures I saw of Spain in the summer: browns and reds and knives in the sunlight. I bet everyone else at the park thought he was just a hot-head, but I knew what he was really charging at.

  He was already good on the court. He got better.

  My grades were already solid at school. I got better. Plenty people would probably say I should be happy enough just to be at Kahena Academy. But, okay, it wasn’t enough. Noa was there already. Ahead of me in all the halls and stairways. On the fields and in the textbooks. Everywhere I entered, a breath later, I was Nainoa’s sister, the shark one, they say he can do crazy things.

  And I could bring home another perfect score on a test and Mom and Dad would smile, rub my back. But I could see in their eyes it wasn’t the same as when Noa came out of his room, finished taking people for the day. They practically fell over the tables trying to get to him. To touch him and coo and bring him water and snacks before dinner.

  I figured it didn’t matter what Dean or me did, then. Turns out I was wrong. By the start of the full school basketball season, Dean was so good he was getting his own sentences, nothing about Noa. “Division One potential” and “guaranteed all-state.” And suddenly the whole family started getting dragged to his high school games. I hated basketball. (“I told you to get ready,” Mom would say, coming into my tiny room, seeing me still on the bed with my books, in my boro-boro clothes. I would say, “He has games like twice a week.” Mom would say, “This is your brother,” like it explained anything. Like I was stupid. I would ugh and ask, “How long is basketball season? I should get extra days to hang out at Crisha’s house for every day I have to go to his stupid games.” Mom would say, “Kaui,” and shake her head, “act right.”) Then sitting up in the woodchip-and-popcorn-smelling upper rafters with the squawking, hoop-earring platform-wedge girls. All that heat from the lights and our butts on the sticky planks of seats, while down on the wood court sweaty boys panted around each other and watched a little ball fall into a little hoop. The horn going off for time-outs or whatever. Grown men with serious faces hollering at teenagers. And each other.

  Noa got into it at the games, too, yelling until his voice was sawed apart, jumping and bumping Mom and Dad. I think Noa just wanted things to be how they were before, when him and Dean and me used to get knotted up in the worst wrestling battles you could imagine, us all elbows and sock-stink, trying for arm bars and rear-naked chokes. Angry and laughing at the same time, hurting each other enough you know it could only be love. Back when the sharks were almost just a story and everything looked like it would stay tight. I bet Noa thought if he cheered hard enough he could get that back.

  And Mom and Dad, too: I saw. Full of yelling, excitement. They had ideas for Dean the same way they had ideas for Noa. So, yeah: Nainoa was becoming and Dean was becoming and I was invisible besides. But I was still becoming, too. I was. Okay, no one saw but that doesn’t matter. There were all sorts of things inside me (like, when we had to build bridges out of toothpicks as a school project, I stole two extra boxes of toothpicks from the school, researched about truss and span design, built a bridge that could hold two more bricks than anyone else’s . . . or when we had the school survivalist competition, and I figured out how to turn the tarp into a small tent and guessed at how a shirt could be used to filter water, I was the one that survived the longest from my class . . . every project like that, I could feel things in me growing strong and steady), and I felt like more and more I could do whatever I wanted. If I wanted it bad enough.

  But oh, man. Then things started to unlock themselves. This one day, another basketball game. Dean had made the varsity team and it was preseason or something. Us back up in the stands and the clock just barely starting to tick down toward halftime and all I was thinking was, If I have to stand up here and clap for one more hour.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” I told Mom. She hardly even looked my way. Which was perfect, right, because it meant I had plenty of time, and once I was out of sight of the court and down the hall toward the bathrooms I just kept going. To the fire escape and the old-brown-paint steel door that creaked me outside. Far on the other side of the parking lot, a cigarette tip danced orange. A little light laughter.

  But then there was something else. Chanting. It was faint, and I turned around and around to try and catch the direction. It was a woman’s voice and there were runs of choppy speaking that started almost like a yelp but then her sounds were more punchy as she said short sentences. Then, at the end of some of the chanted lines, there would be a long-held note, a song and a gut-cry at the same time. It echoed and echoed. It was across the street, what looked like the cafeteria. Cream-colored paint over thick brick and blocky columns. Groaning metal doors propped open against the thick air.

  I stopped just outside the edge of the spilling light, where no one could see me. The cafeteria floor wobbled with the reflection of overhead lights. All the chairs and tables were pushed back to the walls. There was a line of three older women, sitting cross-legged on blankets with their hourglass-shaped ipus, right, thumping them against the ground. Slapping and rolling their knuckles and palms across the hollow shells. And in the middle of the room there were three rows of girls—all older than me, it looked like—dancing hula.

  Just ordinary girls in ordinary clothes. I had heard hula chants already before. But this was different somehow. I could feel something true and old in it, something that was opening all over me, gave me chicken skin.

  I stood just outside the door and watched the whole practice. Sometimes the kumus would stop their ipus and the song and then holler out things like, “Nani, you gotta fix your hela, it’s way off from everyone else,” or, “Jessie, your arms is limp on the kaholo,” and then the song would start over. Three lines of girls, stepping and turning and bouncing. The ipus thumping and finger tapping and the women chanting their song. It got inside me, okay? Deep down. Got me all twisted with something I didn’t know the name of. It went that way and I watched until, behind me, there was the final countdown of the basketball clock. I heard the crowing from the stands and turned, started to walk back down to the gym. Dean and another win, I figured, but it sounded like the game was close. Like maybe everything was unsure, right until the end.

  I didn’t have much time to think about it right away, though. What happened was the next day a man turned up at our house. It started with him pounding a fist on the door. Noa was in his room but for sure he heard.

  Dad was the one to open the door. The man came pouring in, almost landing on his face.

  “Where is he?” the man asked. His whole body was moving. Eyes blinking. Him turning his head toward his shoulder and doing this weird dance-shrug. His hands all butterflies, flapping open and closed at his sides. It was like he was getting gently electrocu
ted.

  “I gotta see him,” the man said.

  “Yeah, no.” Dad crossed his arms so the guy could see the cables of muscle. Dad is, like, surprise strong, usually looks all like a doughy dad body, until he does things like that.

  “It’s not getting better,” the man said. Then he realized he knew where Noa was, started to walk toward Noa and Dean’s bedroom door. Dad put a palm against his chest. The man didn’t even try to push it off. Just leaned into the hand, like it was a strong wind he could push through if he just kept going. But his body was still doing that same electric wiggle and shake, and Dad’s hand stopped his steps.

  “Come out,” he called then. He yelled it toward Noa’s door: Come out, come out, come out. Until spit frosted the sides of his mouth.

  Dad started to wrestle the man back. To the same door he came in. But, okay, just like that, the man and Dad both stopped their surges. Separated and stared down the hall.

  Noa had come out and was standing there. A bald Korean woman with no eyebrows and her face all stretched tight was standing next to him.

  “You shouldn’t—” the man started. He raised his palms, still shaking. “You didn’t stop nothing, see? It’s still coming.”

  He tried to take another step toward Noa, but Dad grabbed him again. “I’m already dead,” he said. “Do you understand?”

  He shook Dad off him. Then he left, screen door slapping on its hinges. Yelling from outside until his hoarse voice disappeared.

  Dad was still in the exact same position. One hand halfway up like he was going to make a point. Or defend himself. Anything. He let his hand fall down. “Maybe we take a break, a little bit,” Dad said. Mom was there, too.

  But the part that mattered most was what came later. When Dean came home and heard the story. He went into his and Noa’s room and closed the door after and of course I went and listened, the cool sludge of the old door paint the only thing between me and my brothers.

  “. . . I could call up Jaycee-them, we could go wreck this guy,” Dean offered.

  “What is this, the Hawaiian Mafia?” Noa said.

  “Just saying,” Dean said.

  “No,” Noa said. “He has Parkinson’s.”

  “Don’t matter if he’s got, like, Rolexes,” Dean said. “He can’t come in here—”

  “It’s a neurological disorder,” Noa said.

  “You fucking punk,” Dean said. “Even when I’m trying for help, you gotta go and be a dictionary.”

  “Sorry,” Noa said.

  They got closer to the door. How I knew is that I could feel their voices buzzing along the ridge of my ear, right through the door.

  “But fine,” Dean said. “I’m supposed for protect you. You’re the one, right?”

  His voice like he was tasting something he didn’t want in his mouth. Especially not anymore, now that he was flexing into a hot-shit basketball star and suddenly he could hear people talk about him, too, not just Noa. But there in that room he said it: you’re the one. And it was like all of a sudden that made it true. Like, we all saw what was happening to Noa, that there was something special. If it wasn’t really the gods of Hawai‘i doing something heavy, maybe it was a new science. Some sort of, I don’t know. Evolution.

  Dean and Noa didn’t say anything else because Dean opened the door. Only I didn’t realize until the snappy click of the doorknob. Jumped back just in time to not dump at their feet.

  Dean snorted. “How’s this, she was listening at the door.”

  “Kaui,” was all Noa said. Like he was a million years tired.

  “I couldn’t hear anything,” I said.

  “Nothing worth hearing,” Dean said. He reached out to muss my hair, pushed too hard when he did it. My brothers split in the hall without another word: Noa with his ‘uke in hand, breaking for the garage. Dean to the front room, probably television, whatever game was on, right? And me still there in the hall. Feeling like—in my own house—there was nowhere to go.

  Every day for the next week I went back to the rec center, listening for the chants and the opening of practice. Usually it was on the basketball court instead of the cafeteria, but either way, I could find it. Voices called. I’d watch from outside the door. When it was done: the girls squatting back on their shoes and then cracking into their cliques. Then the kumus opening their gym bags and slipping in their ipus and then rolling and tucking their mats, the ones they’d used for pounding and sitting. Then putting back on their shoes, too. All of them out the doors and then the shined gym floor, and the chants and the ipu stopped echoing in the rafters. All I could hear was the low buzz of the exit sign.

  Whatever was there, in that air, I can say it fed me. I’d go there and listen and even dance just a little myself. And when it was over and I went home I’d push harder, fly through the pages of my textbooks. Extra-credit science, I’d collect tadpoles from the culvert near our house. Or extra-credit math, right, I’d calculate dice throws or card games. People would find me after class and ask for help on their homework or always want to be my partner in labs and quiz bowl. And this was Kahena I was doing this at.

  Still, something went wrong with Noa after that Parkinson’s guy had showed up. He suddenly stopped taking people in. Mom and Dad would have to go to the door when it knocked and apologize, Sorry, he not gonna come out today, sick or something, I think, all refunds and—after it went on for a few weeks—no extra cash. Mom and Dad at the table with their envelope getting empty, doing long division and subtraction. Always subtraction.

  Noa wouldn’t say what, exactly. Just that he couldn’t.

  “Let him alone,” Mom and Dad would warn, if they saw me sneaking around by the garage door. On the other side he’d be playing the ‘uke. Songs all sad and tricky, sometimes with so many notes and chords tumbling along at the same time, it was like he had an extra hand. Later they’d get him out of the garage and the three of them would smash together on the couch. Faces flashed with white and blue from the television. While me and Dean were the ones doing Noa’s chores, okay? Sweeping the floor or washing the dishes or cleaning the bathroom.

  “Don’t do nothing,” Dean would say, suds to his wrists while he tried to find the last forks.

  Only once I did. Dean in his after-basketball shower, Mom and Dad getting ready for bed. Noa was in the garage, but he wasn’t playing. Hadn’t been for a while.

  When I went through the door he was at the far corner, by Dad’s bench, where Dad kept his hunting and fishing stuff. All his car tools and everything. Noa was hunched on a fold-out chair, pants pulled down to his knees. He was facing away from me.

  I walked over all cockroach-quiet. The air smelled like old wood and Noa was taking these weird deep breaths. He was holding something in one of his hands. Whatever it was he had it low in his hands, so I kept stepping closer to see. I got maybe five feet away when I kicked a bottle cap. It went skittering and pinging into some dark corner and Noa jumped. “Hey—” he started, trying to cover things with his hands. But I made it in time. He couldn’t hide what he was holding.

  There was a hunting knife in his right hand, long and thick and teethy. On his left thigh, up high where his skin was way lighter, there was a fresh cut. Blood was weeping out.

  We started talking all at once. I wanted to know what he was doing and he just wanted me to go away. But I was tired of going. I kept asking was he hurt and should I go get Mom and Dad.

  “No,” he said. “No no no. It’s not an accident.”

  “I know it’s not an accident,” I said. “You see anyone else in here holding a knife?”

  He clunked the knife down on the table like it said something. Like that meant this was over. The cut was weeping blood. Noa was just staring.

  “Fix it,” I said.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “You mean right now?” I asked. “Or, like, ever?”

  We watched it bleed. He was staring so hard I thought his face would pop.

  “Noa?”

&n
bsp; “It’s never been like New Year’s,” he said.

  It made everything make sense. How he would only see people with his door closed, all alone. How the Parkinson’s man came back. “Noa,” I said, “all those people—”

  “I still did something,” he said. “I could feel it most times, almost like I was in their bodies. But there are all these things that keep coming, pictures, commands, I don’t know—” And he slapped his palm against his head. Hard once. Then again. Then again, with his eyes clamped closed. And tears ran from the edges of his lids.

  I put my hand on his back, but he jerked away like he’d been bitten. “Get away,” he said.

  I guess I wasn’t surprised. So I did what he said.

  I went back to the gym the next day after school. More heat than before. No clouds, making the afternoon almost like a squinty headache. The spitting pop of bus brakes. Voices hollering into and out of the gym. Even the bright crack of people playing pool in the front rec room. I watched the hālau from outside the door.

  We had an arrangement, okay. Because I never asked my mom and dad about paying to join. I knew the answer. So the kumus said I could still come if I only watched from outside, right? When Kumu Wailoa—the one with her tissue-paper-worn tank tops, vana of armpit hair poking out, chicken-pox forehead and smile like a dolphin—when she said I could learn whatever I saw, I told myself I’d learn everything.

  The kumus started the music for the warm-up. Easy soft slaps of the ipu. I did the warm-up, same as the girls inside: ‘Ami, ‘uwehe, kaholo, hela, the step and swing, arms like lightning bolts sometimes and then like water. Rock and circle of the hips. My back and all those bones. Stiff as a spear. It made me feel right. Like a back-in-the-day Hawaiian woman, the beat of their hula. Their scarred, flexy, almost-black skin, I felt it. Closed lips with mana and their naked chee-chees out in the open, no haole dresses. Fisted hands that wove lau hala mats and pulled kalo from the fields.