Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  Her eyes would go down and up when she looked from the groceries to the customer. I remember ’um clear, because it made me think of my application days. That first letter, how when it came Mom started with a bright voice, all, Here’s one from Kahena Academy! And if the letter was lighter than we thought no one said nothing and then we were all ripping it open and Dad’s hand gripped my shoulder and Mom’s eyes swooped low with reading and then her eyes came back up wet heavy and she said, Okay. Okay.

  How many times I tried for get into Kahena Academy, where Noa and Kaui are now, where they got scholarships for us Native Hawaiians, but you gotta prove you’re worth it with a fully juice test, all haole words and useless math. Like just because you can define “catalyst,” you get in.

  We regret to inform you. Our applicant pool is three to one and growing. We encourage you. Try again.

  Seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth, me applying and the letters coming, one every year. And then the try for the next year would start: fat flexy prep books and Mom packing me J. Yamamoto Whole Wheat Crackers and I was all, No Ritz? And Mom was all, It’s twice the price and you’re only paying for the commercials, and so J. Yamamoto crackers with old peanut butter and me in the cafeteria as soon as school was out, sweating the prep books until practice. All those mornings on the bus to Lincoln, Jaycee-guys would be talking about Monday Night Football or Temptation Island, and I was all, FOIL method and quadratic equation, and they were all, The hell does that mean, and I was all, I don’t know but I feel like I’m having its baby.

  Kaui and Noa got into Kahena their first try.

  And Dad every week working luggage at the airport with after-dark overtime. And Mom some mornings and some nights and if she’s lucky both at J. Yamamoto, her going after extra shifts the way a crackhead goes after batu. And at the end of the night them coming home with work still banging around in their bones, might as well they’re saying, Dean, can’t you see what we are? And me wanting to say it don’t matter if I can’t get what they want on some stupid test, guess whose name everyone knows after the arena on Friday night. Guess who can tell you how the girls smell naked at almost every school in our division.

  I stayed by the side of the window, near the propane rack. Customers came and went, I could hear my mom and Trish talking with ’um, you could tell when it was a local because there was plenty laughs and names of cousins and grandmas rolling around all relaxed, but when it was haoles usually they were like, Do you know what time the Arizona Memorial opens, or How do I get to Sea Life Park from here. And Mom and Trish answered but you could tell they wanted for be like, Everyone brown is not your tour guide. Mom got hours left of standing, trying for smile, taking people’s cards and giving them all the steaks and swordfish and fancy beer they want.

  Listen, all of you, I wanted for say: I’m going to take us all away from this. I’m gonna make it so that can’t no one order us around for anything. And the way is basketball. Noa might be special but he’s not money. I can do it. Here, then college, then pros, and I mean it. I’ll make so much money it’ll be coming out my okole. I always felt that and then I was making ’um happen.

  Only now every basketball game was worse. Another week just the same. When they’re over, when it’s quiet and there’s space in my head, it fills up with that night, how much I wanted for hurt Noa and Mom both, like really wanted to break some part of them, and the way afterward my knuckles felt like beehives, full of all this small pain that’s still stinging me from the inside, trying to get out.

  But I had that shoebox and I figured why not? and texted Jaycee I was too sick to practice and instead I caught the bus to Ala Moana Park to hang out past the hibachis. To sell. I was over by the part where you still got some of the old-fish stink of the bathrooms but you couldn’t see it easy from the street, so I figured it was the safest spot. The ocean was all sagging against the rocks, had that grass starting for die in a yellow way. When I first sat there, for a while before buyers started coming, it was even fully peaceful. No basketball no Noa no nothing and I was actually thankful.

  But the buyers came. They always find me. At least I still got my flow for that if nothing else.

  I sold until I shouldn’t. Until the ocean was ashy from the black clouds mobbing down off the Ko‘olaus and a few raindrops slapped my head. I sold until everything was empty. Then I went home.

  When I got to the front door at our house, I heard the popping rips of meat hitting oil in a pan and from the half-burned golden smell of breadcrumbs frying I figured it was Mom making chicken katsu. I was home later than I should’ve been, so I stood at the door trying for think about my story when Mom just opened the door for me.

  “I thought that was you,” she said, with her tired smile.

  I looked over my shoulder. Not like there’s anyone or anything back there at the end of the cul-de-sac, but it gave me a second to think about what to do.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Long practice today.”

  “Nainoa told me about the new study group you’re in after school. Must be hard to do that after practice?”

  It took me a minute to figure out what Noa did for me and then I nodded and said, “Yeah. But I’m doing okay.”

  “Good,” she said.

  I took my shoes off, put my ball on the ground. It rolled across the slanted-ass floor, toward the hall to our bedrooms. That bent-ass floor. Our tin roof all shot with rust. Our kitchen counter that’s got all these black and yellow spots from years of smokers and slackers that had the house before us. We were getting ready for eat chicken, from the sale bin I bet at J. Yamamoto, with the sell-by date way past, so that Mom gotta bread the hell outta it for keep the real taste hidden.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Like all of a sudden. Like a guilty kid.

  She stopped turning the chicken, looked right at me. “I thought we talked about this,” she said. “It isn’t about just sorry.”

  “I can be better,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “So do it.”

  “Noa, too, yeah?” I said. “It’s not just me.”

  Mom was getting paper towels out to cover a tray for the katsu. “We need you to support your brother right now. Let him worry about his problems.”

  It was weird silent after that. I could’ve said, This is bullshit, making me be his helper, but I thought of Mom at J. Yamamoto. Just didn’t seem right to fight anymore. “How was your day?” I asked.

  I almost never asked her that, I don’t know why. She realized it, too, because I saw her brighten and fully think. Took a minute before she answered.

  “My day,” she finally said, tapping the tongs on the pan. “My day sucked dick.”

  “Right, I get you,” I said. “What kind of dick, though? There’s all kinds, you’ve got your long horse dick, your furry goat dick, your hot bull dick . . .

  “But,” I make like I’m thinking, even rub my chin, “that’s really more of a balls thing, with the bull.”

  Mom laughed. It was a good one, too, like it just firecrackered out from a place even she didn’t know was there. “God, boys,” she said. “You’re all so sick. I should know better than to even get you started.”

  “I’m a perfect gentleman,” I said, “once you get to know me.”

  “A perfect gentleman can help set the table, then,” Mom said. She pointed at the silverware drawer.

  She asked me to go tell Noa and Kaui that dinner was almost ready, and that I should take my backpack to my room, and then she was back with the plates and the katsu and I did my part before going to our room, me and Noa’s.

  He was there, head-down into his ‘uke, but it fell off the minute I came in.

  I was all, You can keep playing, just that it’s dinner soon, and he said he was done anyway, then him just sitting there half curled over his ‘uke and me holding the doorknob thinking, How come every time now I talk in this house it’s like someone caught me kissing my cousin.

  “You didn’t have to lie,” I said. “With Mom.” />
  He leaned back on his arms. “I know,” he said.

  And I guess that’s all we could do.

  Then there was dinner, me and him just listened to Kaui or Mom, not much except if we were asked whatever, which was plenty from Mom for Noa, come to think of it. Still wasn’t long before dinner was done and we all peeled off on our own, Kaui back in her room on homework and Noa in the garage with his ‘uke, back to the crazy stuff he did when he got lost in it, and I tried for work on my econ homework but in the end all I could do was write The market clearing price is I’m fucked and then I was on the couch, watching SportsCenter, and everyone else was asleep.

  I still had hours left before my head would give up, I could tell. So I went into our bedroom and there’s Noa’s sleep-weight in the darkness, could feel him all heavy and gone in his breathing. In the closet had my Flu Game Jordans and the Allen Iverson Sixers away jersey. I suited up and grabbed my basketball and felt all the places the texture bumps was wearing down. It was way-black in the night, like after midnight. Had the basketball pinned under one arm, carrying my shoes in that hand, when I came back out to the living room and there was Mom’s purse.

  The refrigerator kicked on and grumbled, ice clattered inside. I could see where Mom’s wallet was, right in front, the gold clasp rubbing off to silver underneath.

  The cash I was holding all came from someone else—just strangers I sold pakalolo in the park—but, then, that money was mine, maybe the only thing that felt like it. And it wasn’t nearly enough for change anything that mattered in our family. The only way I could do that for real was to make, like, haole-kind money, until there wasn’t nothing I couldn’t buy for Mom and Dad. Noa could become president or a new kahuna or famous doctor or whatever, but the only thing I could be was right there in my hands, that basketball. I put the money back in my pocket. Then I was out the door and down the street, through Kalihi in the dark.

  The park was closed that late but that didn’t mean nothing, had the backboard all mossy on the edges and streaked with mud from other people balling in the rain from earlier that day. The net was broke in one or two places, sagging and hanging into its own holes.

  I bounced the ball a few times, listened to the ringy pound. The wind came on and the trees clattered like applause. I closed my eyes for the first shot, I don’t know why. I took my shot, let the ball start with everything coming up through my ankles, jumping clean, but when the ball came off my fingers I knew it was all wrong and then the clang of the rim and the ball bouncing into the chain-link fence. I watched it till it stopped moving.

  I went and snagged the ball and took another shot, eyes open, and it swooped in and out of the rim and bounced, bounced, right to the edge of the court. I quick-stepped and scooped the basketball. I cut to the corner and then busted a crossover, turned, bent with my back to the rim like I had D on me, might as well it was Kahena Academy, or whoever else thought they could try for defend me. But can’t no one defend me. I was fadeaway spinning for the hoop and I let my shot go high and right at it. I watched it rainbow down. I knew that shot was going in, already I could see it dropping through with that swish, it had to, it had to, just like I’m saying, I’m unstoppable.

  5

  MALIA, 2002

  Kalihi

  I can’t hear your voice, but I know that you’re still listening, always. And so I can tell you: sometimes I believe none of this would have happened if we’d stayed on the Big Island, where the gods are still alive. Fire goddess Pele with her unyielding strength, birthing the land again and again in lava, exhaling her sulfur breath across the sky. Kamapua‘a, wanting her love, bringing his rain and stampede of pig hooves to break her lava down, make it into fertile soil, the way it is all across the grassy hills of Waimea, down into the valleys, surrounding where you were born. Or there is Kū, god of war, who one day plunged himself into that same soil, turning from a father and a husband into a tree, a tree to bear fruit for his starving wife and children. The first breadfruit. He was a god of war, but he was also a god of life. Sometimes he came as a shark . . .

  So I wonder if some of him is you, and if some of you is him, the way the ocean and the dirt and the air here are all made of the gods. It was what I believed at first: That you were made of the gods, that you would be a new legend, enough to change all the things that hurt in Hawai‘i. The asphalt crushing kalo underfoot, the warships belching filth into the sea, the venomous run of haole money, California Texas Utah New York, until between the traffic jams and the beach-tent homeless camps and big-box chain stores nothing was the way it should have been. I believed that you could defeat this.

  With shame now I see that could never have been the case. But I remember when I was especially full of faith, and it was the day your father and I discovered your graveyard.

  Do you remember? You were a junior in classes, although barely sophomore-aged, and still Principal’s List and Science Club captain and playing the ‘ukulele like you’d swallowed the whole Hawaiian history. And it was good, all of it. Excellent. Though the truth is that, for all the pride we had in everything you were doing, there still was, especially for me, a feeling of failure. We’d pushed you the wrong way after that New Year’s, expecting you to fix the people who heard what you were capable of and came to our door, hollowed out with desperation. Yes, I thought, this is it, he’ll start with them, and it will grow.

  And yes, there was something in it for us, too. We did want—we did need—the extra money that came in. I’m sorry.

  When you stopped taking those requests, you closed off from us even further. So much about you became a secret, and I don’t think you ever completely came back. This we also came to understand after that graveyard day.

  Do you remember the graveyard? I do. The rare day your father and I were both home in the after-school hours; we noticed you’d left and hadn’t come back.

  “He just took that same path he always takes,” Kaui said, shrugging when we asked.

  It was late. We wanted you back. So we took the path, too. Around the corner and across the street from our house, the brown footpath dropped behind frazzled hedges to an open field. Scummed water trickled through a canal to the left, and beyond, a hurricane fence fronted the dusty backyards of muffler shops and industrial warehouses. Tuna smells bloomed along the path, which continued straight to a distant clump of trees. Along the path, as we walked, we saw cairn after cairn, each rock pile newer than the one before. Only the cairns weren’t all stone: they were spiny and flashing with bike cogs, car engine parts, abandoned elbows of pipe. Some were already covered in weeds.

  “What are these?” I asked your father. He squatted next to one.

  “Look like graves to me,” he said, which I had already known would be the answer.

  “Augie,” I said.

  “He’s down here,” your father said. “Somewhere.”

  Your father turned toward the trees at the end of the path. From the industrial lots came the sound of metal slicing over itself, the crack of a pallet dropping in the dirt.

  We stood and went on along the path, the graves at regular intervals, shin-high piles of rocks and scrap metal. The last cairn before we reached the trees was topped with a half-buried plastic robot, something you had built in one of your incredible science classes at Kahena. The robot was a sun-scalded blue, scoured with animal marks.

  I bent and touched it. “This is Nainoa’s,” I said to your father. It looked like a few brown scabs of blood were clinging to the inside of the robot’s arms. What I smelled coming off the cairn was mostly a rocky smell, but underneath, faintly, something of old wet leather and rotting cotton.

  “Some of the other stuff, from before, that was from our garage, too, I think,” your father said. “Had an old gear from his first bike.”

  The trees were as close as they were going to get without us going into them. There was a dizzy feeling starting in my head.

  It wasn’t as dark as I had expected inside, the trees were low wi
th sun breaks. As we walked the dizzy feeling I’d had expanded, running down my skull along each rung of my spine and throat, into my chest. My eyes felt fogged, blurred, and when I opened them wide again, I snatched your father’s hand, as if I might fill with whatever I was feeling and float away.

  We stopped. There was a clearing on the other side of the trees and you were there, sitting in the grass, your knees kinked up with your elbows resting on them, fingers playing at the air between your ankles, as if you were waiting to be picked up after school.

  “Thank God,” your father said. “I thought maybe he was back here playing with hisself.”

  I told him to stop, which never works with your father.

  “No, it’s okay, I got a few friends that was like that back in the day. Did I tell you about how John-John tried with his dog’s—”

  “Augie, shut up.”

  There was a mess in the sky. A dark shape wobbled through the break in the trees, flapping and tumbling, and smacked into the earth right next to you. A feather fluffed through the air. The shape rose—I saw that it was an owl—and dragged itself toward you, a few sloppy heaves of its bulk before it collapsed at your feet, chest up. We watched that chest swell and shrink, slower and slower.

  You closed your eyes and put your hands on it.

  “Is he,” your father said.

  The owl’s breathing slowed again, and again. It was such a paper-light thing. Your face tightened and furrowed, sweat rolled down the line of your jaw. The dizziness in me surged. I was weightless, I was in the sky, beating my arms, only they weren’t arms, they were the stringy muscle and soaring sheets of feathered wings. I rocketed into the sky, all blue everywhere but for the knobbed ridges of the Ko‘olaus getting smaller beneath me. Everything was air, fringed in golden light, and I rose toward the sun like I was riding the fastest elevator, surging and expanding, until everything I was seeing popped, like the lightest bubble.