I was back in the trees, standing with your father, and in the cradle of your hands, the owl had stopped breathing. Without shifting from your kneeling position, you yanked the owl’s body up by the wing and pitched the whole body hard back into the grass. A leg flopped crookedly in the wrong direction.
“Shit!” you called out once, your voice warbled and breaking, the true voice of a boy. You clutched your head in both hands and wailed at the ground.
“Don’t,” your father said, lurching in one crackling rush from our hiding spot, before I could stop him. “Don’t!”
You turned at the sound, your face snotted and flushed. As your father moved forward, you scrambled back.
“Don’t touch me,” you warned, and your father froze in a crouch, arms outstretched to gather you up. Our gazes locked, then moved apart, and I turned mine again to the owl. One wing was jutting up from the limp mess of feathers, and tufts of fluff fluttered when the breeze came through. I wasn’t even a little sad, as I’d expected I should have been; instead I was filled with the echoes of what I’d felt and seen just before, golden and rising.
“We just wanted to make sure you was safe,” your father said.
You stood, went to the owl.
“Nainoa,” I said, because you seemed small and guilty of something, black-brown hair shorter than your brother’s with that side part you used to have, and you were still in your white polo and navy school pants, your right arm across your body, gripping the biceps of your hanging left. “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” you said. That was when I saw the trowel, you must have brought it from our garage. You yanked it from the ground and began digging.
“Do you want help?” your father asked.
“You can’t help me,” you said.
And so your father came back to me. We didn’t stay to watch you dig the rest. It didn’t seem right.
We stood outside the trees, by one of the cairns.
“Did you feel anything in there?” I asked Augie.
“Felt like I was flying,” Augie said. “Might as well it was right into the sun.”
My mind was just catching up with what we’d felt, what we’d seen. “Augie, my God, how long has he been seeing things like that? Doing things like that?” I wanted to count the graves, to consider how many animals you’d lived their last breaths with, how many times you’d tried, and failed, to make a difference. How many other things you might be seeing and feeling without us, all of it like running into a wall over and over. The thought that we’d be able to help you through this, to guide you to what you were supposed to become, was total stupidity; along with what we’d been asking you to perform for us, in our home, with the desperate neighbors we’d subjected you to, the stories we told you about what we thought you were. It came unspooling from me as we stood there.
“I use whatever I can find,” you said. “When there aren’t enough stones.”
You’d come up behind us while we did our own thinking. You had more to say, and if we’d asked, if we hadn’t, it didn’t matter; you kept talking. Waved the trowel at the grave we were considering. “This was a dog,” you said. “Some poi dog, like I couldn’t tell what kind.”
You said you’d found it down there when you were out messing around along the canal, skipping stones and taking a break from everything. The dog had been hit by a car. Probably one of the shipping trucks or construction monsters that were always grinding and shuddering along the canal. After it had been hit, the dog dragged itself, all its broken parts, to the clearing. I can only imagine the jammy trail of its insides it must have left along the ground.
You said that you’d tried to fix it, that when you’d laid hands on it, for the first time you felt something important: all the broken places in its body. It was like a puzzle, you said, and all you had to do was put the pieces back together. But you worked in one place and another would start to die. Then you’d turn to that place and the part that you fixed before would be unraveling itself, and on and on, until finally you lost. “I was the dog at the very end,” you said, and started shivering. “I was running on this bright road. Paws ticking into the mud, my body this bouncing knot of muscles. It was like I was dumb with happiness, I don’t know . . . I ran and ran and ran, but everything got weaker and weaker, until I was just . . . floating into darkness.”
You’d buried the dog here and sometimes came back to visit. You said it always made you feel better, lighter, as if you were again the dog, running.
And standing there was exactly like that. Later the field would be fenced off and the fence would become a wall and the wall would become another building, storing and manufacturing cement, and the graveyard was gone, somewhere under the foundation. But I remember it as it was then.
You explained that other animals had come after the dog. Flocks and strays, poisoned from antifreeze and wrecked from car strikes and being chewed up by cancer, crawling on their last to arrive here, waiting for you. To give up their last sparks.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” you said. “I keep messing up.”
Augie put his hand on your shoulder. “No you don’t,” he said.
“What do you mean?” you asked.
“Feels way happy, doesn’t it?” Augie asked. “Right at the end. Feels that way to me, anyway.”
But you shook your head. “I have to start fixing things.
“I have to fix everything,” you corrected.
Whole nights after the sharks, your father and I had been wondering what would happen, what you would be. I believe that graveyard day was the first time we truly understood the scale of you. If you were more of the gods than of us—if you were something new, if you were supposed to remake the islands, if you were all the old kings moving through the body of one small boy—then of course I could not be the one to guide you to your full potential. My time as a mother was the same as those last gasping breaths of the owl, and soon enough you’d have to gently set down my love, fold it up into the soil of your childhood, and move beyond.
I remember leaning back against your father’s chest as we sat in the grass. Shadows had moved over the water in the canal, but far beyond that, the lights in Honolulu were winking on. The golden feeling of the owl’s last flight stayed with me, even if the vision had long since coasted into the dark.
PART II
ASCENSION
6
DEAN, 2004
Spokane
Way I figure, before the first Hawaiians became Hawaiians, it was them back in Fiji or Tonga or wherever and they had too many wars with too many kings and some of the strongest looked at the stars and saw a map to a future they could take for themselves. Broke their backs making themselves canoes to cut through forty-foot swells and sails big enough to make a fist out the wind and then they got free from their old land. Goodbye old kings goodbye old gods goodbye old laws goodbye old power goodbye limits. Came a time in all their salty tattoo-muscle nights on the water when they seen the white light of the moon over the new land of Hawai‘i and they was like: This. This is ours. All us, all now.
That’s me that first night in Spokane. For real I felt all the kings that came before me in a heavy way, like they was right inside my heart, like they was chanting through my blood. I could see them with me, even if my eyes didn’t close. We were the same, me and them: I went launching across the big gap of sky between Hawai‘i and the mainland, seen the big grids of mainland city lights from the plane window, skyscrapers and highways that just kept going and going, all gold and white. For me they was just like those navigating stars for the original Hawaiians, pointing the direction to what’s mine. When I stepped off the night shuttle to Spokane and stood in front the clean lawns and new brick buildings and saw the coaching staff ready to greet me as one of the top freshman basketball recruits in the whole country I was like: all me, all now. King me, motherfuckers.
Before, back in Hawai‘i, all everyone wanted was for me
to believe in Noa, to raise him up. Like my job was to be his keeper, to be second place and help him get to the finish line.
Hate to break it to you, but I don’t fit in second place.
And for what? It’s not like Noa ever got us nothing to show for it, Mom and Dad still hurting for money at the end of the month. Same thing all over the islands. Only way you get out of something like that is to be so good the only thing anyone can do is pay you. And pay you big. That’s what I knew I was finally gonna do when I got to Spokane.
This started in, what, fall 2004. Only thing that mattered was basketball. Captains ran the off-season work and so we was all in the arena, upstairs where the track is, wall squats and wind sprints, then back to the weight room. Guys was asking if I’d ever seen a place like this, rows and rows and rows of clean bleachers for thousands of fans, the weight-room facilities with top-end machines and new paint on the racks, and I was like, Just because I’m from the islands you think I never seen nothing like this. But, then, it was true, too, not because the islands but because Lincoln High. I only seen facilities this way when we was playing away games at Kahena or the other rich-ass prep schools. So, yeah, I seen a place like this, but never before was it mine.
All the halls and laboratories and commons like they got fresh paint every other year, pretty little bookshop with all its way-too-fucking-high prices. But everywhere I swear except in the locker room the university was white as milk. I saw brown people on the sidewalk and I was like, Thank God, I was starting for think I was the last one left.
And the classes? Didn’t even know what I’d signed up for, serious, someone from the front office of the team took care of registration, and the homework I got help on, guys on the team tipped me off to finding a tutor first week, sophomore girl if I can help it, big eyes toothpick jeans cross around her neck, like that. She’ll help out, they said, She’ll know who we are. And it was just like they said. I had to write down the numbers and words myself, sure, but if my brain was there it was on the scoop of her elbow, the freckles across her nose. Gotta love college.
But basketball, we went hard. Every day, all the time. Fifteen of us on the grind ten times harder than I ever did back home. Just balling all the time, the tamp tamp tamp of the basketball into that polished wood, the perfect chirp of our shoes. We ran one-on-ones, we ran two-on-twos, we ran two-on-ones. Contested mid-range jumpers and turnarounds and arc shooting drills. This was a whole new level, though. Guys on the team was all way quicker and stronger and smarter than anyone I ever played against back at Lincoln, now I’m playing men instead of kids, and for that first year I felt it. They all had a step and an inch more in the air than me, half my stuff was getting blocked or picked, and it was almost like the atmosphere around me would sink and get soft.
Be bigger. Be stronger and faster. I had to.
After practice, there’d be like four or five of us in the cafeteria, knees icing in fat blisters of plastic sports wrap, staring at our plates of limp beef broccoli, no hunger since we was all still on the afterburn of whatever bull-ring-type drill coach had just put us through. The greasy smell of burnt meat filling the cathedral ceiling of the dining hall, the cold of the tabletop, it was all huli-huli in my head. Made me feel faded even though I was sober as a Jehovah.
“I think I just fell asleep with my eyes open,” Grant said.
“You did,” DeShawn said, “I seen it. Me, I’m just trying to keep from pissing myself. How am I supposed to take a leak when I got all this in the way?” He jiggled his ice-packed knees. “They ice up our knees like this, they should give us some diapers, too.”
“You’re, what, rehydrating or something?” Grant asked, nodding at the XL cup DeShawn was drinking from. “This kid’s always trying to rehydrate, but first thing in the morning he’s drinking Diet Coke.” They was roommates, white-ass Grant with his Stockton wigger thing going on and DeShawn from L.A.
“I need the caffeine,” DeShawn said, like he was apologizing.
“Drink coffee, fool.”
“Tastes like your mama.”
“Come on,” Grant said. “I’m tryna relax, here.”
“You been relaxing all semester,” DeShawn said, “with your history classes and all that. All I can think about is Business Calc. Midterm in two days and I’m supposed to study tonight? My brain feels like I been hotboxing.”
“Like a balloon, right? Like if your neck wasn’t holding it on.”
“Yeah.”
“Grant’s head always feels like that,” I said. “I bet he was the kid eating glue in the back of the class.”
“Him in elementary with his big ears,” DeShawn said. “I can see it.”
“Elementary nothing,” I said. “I’m talking about last week.”
DeShawn and Grant both cracked up, like howling, bending forward over the table, other guys, too.
That was it—that feeling. I was starting for get inside something then, I was part of those guys. We was out on that court bleeding and scraping and working together, the way they’d say, Good, get that next pass a little stronger, thread that here, or when I did finally sink a few jumpers they was like, That, do that again, every time—I knew they believed in me. They saw what I was, what I was gonna be.
What was back home? I was calling Mom and Dad from the start of the semester, usually sitting on the couch we’d shoved under our lofted dorm bed, the couch all avocado checker pattern with cigarette-burn freckles and the wall opposite with the mini-fridge. Chicken-scratch sound of my roommate, Price, writing out his homework—he didn’t get a laptop, just like me, maybe the only two guys at school without computers, it’s like I never get a break from being reminded where I came from—and I would talk with everyone on the phone, Mom Dad Noa Kaui, one at a time.
“So, what, how’s the weather?” I would ask Dad, every time, because I know he loved to laugh at my cold ass and say, “Brah, it’s all good, every day, me and Mom and Kaui and Noa at the beach last weekend, sun in the morning and rain at night, just perfect. How’s the land of shave ice? You lick a pole and get your tongue stuck yet?” And then he’d giggle and say, “Nah nah nah. Tell me how’s it going.”
And he would tell me small-kind something, and then Mom would get on and she’d do the same, but both of ’um pretty quick got to the point where they was all like, You gotta see what your brother is doing back here. Every time, every call, it always got there, no matter what I did. They’d say how even the teachers didn’t know what for do with Noa, he was burning through upper-division Kahena classes whether it was chemistry or Hawaiian language or AP calculus like it wasn’t nothing. How had him in the Honolulu Advertiser for his perfect SAT scores and there was all these fat envelopes and e-mails and calls from colleges storming into the house, how they was trying for get him taking classes at the university already. And they was saying probably Stanford was where he was going.
I hated this part of the call. I wanted for know and didn’t want for know what he was doing. Especially what he was doing doing, his kahuna abilities, right? But still yet, when Mom was talking to me, she’d usually be all about some award Noa was getting, his new special classes or whatever, and yet they never said nothing about that other part of him, the part we all still didn’t fully understand. “Sometimes I wish I knew what was going on inside of him,” Mom would say. “Does he tell you anything?”
First couple of times she did that—asked me about him, like me and him were talking with each other behind her back, the way normal brothers do, I guess—I thought she didn’t understand how things was.
I snapped this one time. “You know,” I said, “maybe I don’t believe in him so much anymore. Not the way you do.”
“There’s nothing to believe,” Mom said. “You’re going to lie about what you’ve seen with your own eyes?”
“I’m not saying what is or isn’t here,” I said. “But how come I never felt anything like that myself? How come if there’s gods they’re not in all of us?”
�
��Where’s this coming from?” Mom asked. “Haoles getting to you? You never talked this way before.”
“It’s just I figure you’re not seeing the right things,” I said. “Full-ride scholarship, Mom. People that come here go early in the NBA draft. Every year. Maybe you’re not gonna see it until I bring in that first fat check, though.”
“All I asked is whether Noa was talking to you or not,” Mom said. I let her squash it. Maybe I don’t feel anything the way you feel it because I’m the only one paying attention to how the world works, I wanted for say.
“Noa doesn’t tell me nothing special, Mom.” Which was true. When me and him talked on the phone—you could hear Mom and Dad make him take his turn—we’d be all like, What’s up, nothing, heard there’s gonna be some new laboratory at school, yep, I guess you and the team got a road trip coming up, yep, cool, it’s raining here right now, which sucks, I wanted to go to the beach, you got any other news, nah, me neither.
But check it: there was always this pause. That’s how I knew there was stuff happening inside him that he wouldn’t tell no one about. But I couldn’t ever cross over from where I’d gone to where he was. I don’t know why. Take me back there now and I’d jump that gap in a minute, even if it took some mahu-style crybaby speech, some sort of over-the-phone hug. You take me back now and I’d do it like nothing.
On those family calls usually I would get Kaui last. I bet Mom-guys was bribing her, like she couldn’t go Prince Kuhio mall unless she talked to me, but honestly talking with her was the best part. Surprised me as much as anyone.
Sharks in the Time of Saviours Page 7
