Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  I remember this one time when she was, like, “Did they do that thing where they start asking you about Noa?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Every time! Why do they always do that?”

  “I swear sometimes it’s like they forget I’m here, Dean,” she said. “They tell you how I got on Principal’s List at Kahena? Or the National Honor Society?” She was still, what, fourteen or whatever, but I was always like, whoa, because of how much she sounded like she was already out the house. Almost like I could hear her comparing mortgage rates and checking off a packing list for a New York City conference with a glass of wine and Sudoku in one hand while she’s still talking story with me in the other.

  “I dunno,” I said. “I think so.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “What about hula?” I asked, anything to have us both not be pissed for a minute.

  “Hula’s good,” she said. “I’m in the performance group. We did a thing at Ala Moana last weekend, and we have another performance coming up at the Hilton. Like we even get paid for it, but we have to give it back to the hālau.”

  “Sounds like you’re mostly dancing for haoles,” I said. “You like that?”

  “Oh my God, kiss my ass, Dean,” she said. “I bet that is even browner than your face now. How’s the cold weather, making you haole, right?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “And I bet they give you starstruck and Brazilian-waxed freshman girls to do your homework.”

  Me laughing. “Come on, I was just joking about the haole hula,” I said, even though she was right and I was right, and we both knew it. Now when I think about it, seems pretty funny, how we both had each other figured out and we both hated it.

  “Everyone’s always ‘just joking,’ right?” Kaui said. “Except when they’re not.”

  “Easy, killer,” I said, even though I knew what she had. That hunger, that rage.

  I think even talking about Noa, small-kind the way we did, was still something. We had that together, our own way, you know? Mostly Kaui didn’t like me, I don’t blame her, especially later, when things was bad at Spokane and she was out on her own, college in San Diego, that time she liked me even less. But for a while when it was just us talking on the phone we’d brag a little to each other, hold each other up, stuff that no one else was gonna do for us. And I seen that even if I was the first canoe out to sea, crashing through what we figured was possible for our family, Kaui and Noa was coming right behind.

  That first year, yeah, I was getting my head up and starting to hang with the other guys on the court, but I was still the backup to Rone, who was the starting two-guard and the guy everyone looked to when the games got tight. By the time sophomore season started, I was doing everything I could not to be his dick rider, hitting the weight room and the stairs and the box jumps, had the ankle weights strapped on every minute I wasn’t at practice even, calluses growing around where they rubbed my legs raw when I walked. Started for be like I fell asleep and woke up on the court, bleeding or sweating or spitting over equipment in the weight room, the cheep of shoes on the polished court floor, the flow and dip and rise, me and the ball. But nobody, the team, coach, nobody, still knew what I was.

  And then there was this one night when we had a home game and they called it Hawaiian Night, where they gave every fan a plastic lei for wear in the stands and had rum punch and pineapple and shitty kalua pig at the concessions. When we stepped into the arena for warm-ups and I saw that some people in the stands must’ve known beforehand and had their cheap polyester online-bought aloha shirts, straw hats, and those stupid drinks in their hands, I wanted for punch every haole I saw in the throat.

  I remember all this like I’m still playing the game right now, like the part that happened next happened in my body and keeps happening every time now, when I remember. We had Duke there that night, huge early-season game where we wanted for show everyone what we could be, but by halftime we were down by twelve and sinking.

  When we were standing in the hallway, waiting for come back out for the second half warm-ups, something happened to me. Maybe it was how they had an Iz song playing on the sound system, maybe it was seeing all the aloha prints, maybe somehow the smell of bullshit concession kalua and pōke got the taste of the real stuff from back home going in my mouth, maybe it was something coming from the actual Hawaiians that was in the stand—had more of ’um than I thought in Spokane—or maybe it was just something in me, rising up only because I knew where I was from and what was happening that night.

  I don’t know. Something in the air. Something green and fresh and blooming, I swear I was smelling the islands, how it was when we was little, back in the valley, ferns after rain and the salty mist by the black sand beach. Almost like there was voices in my head, chanting. That same king feeling in my chest, ancient and big.

  I got back on the court and I was everywhere, all at once. All the other players was exit signs I was passing on the freeway. I poked the ball away from their slow stupid fingers and crossed over and blitzed and had skyhooks and floaters and threes from so deep might as well I was taking shots from outer space. Everything went in. Like I was throwing pebbles into a lake. Coach was pissed I think because I didn’t hardly pass, I was coast-to-coast half the time, got to be that everyone on my team and everyone on the other team just stopped to watch, I swear. Whole arena like, Here he comes again.

  Final buzzer goes and we win by ten and I’m right in the middle of our jumping chest-beating mob on the court. Whole place exploding with cheers and noise and all us on the team shoving and screaming in each other’s faces, where you can feel the heat and spit of all your brothers, like, We won. And later, when wasn’t no one left in the locker room and I started out across the campus by myself, dirty snow and wet brick walls, that feeling from the islands was still inside me, running under my skin like blood, even when the air was so cold had steam cooking off my head and my breath smoking out into the freeze.

  I didn’t slow down on the court after that. More games went that way. And things started for change, about who knew me and who didn’t. Got for be that when I did my phone calls home, Mom and Dad started talking plenty about me, Mom saying how people was asking about me when they seen her at J. Yamamoto and the local news stations started following all our games, saying how I was from Hawai‘i and look at me now at the university, plenty people on the islands talking already about the playoffs and the tournament, where I’m gonna go in the draft, clapping Dad’s back during his airport shifts, How’s your son’s double-double last night, yeah? Those days, all those games after Hawaiian Night, I was holding that big feeling inside me, what woke that night at halftime, something like a hurricane, and—even if it wasn’t the same as what was in Noa?—I knew it was still giant, still powerful enough to yank my family up from that shitty house in Kalihi and set us all down someplace better.

  7

  KAUI, 2007

  San Diego

  The first time I met van we were at the black throat of a culvert with a slice of cocaine between us and she was asking did I want some. I was still coming down with no oxygen after escaping a skunked and stale house party that had been busted by Campus Safety, same as Van and her friends, and when they saw me on the sidewalk after we’d ran, Van said, I heard what you were playing on the stereo, and she turned to one of her friends and said, This bitch was playing Jedi Mind Tricks! And the friend, Katarina, laughed in a way that made her lip ring shine with the wet flash of her teeth. They were two haole girls and a Vietnamese boy, who had unwrapped his dick from his pants so he could turn away from us and hose a spattering piss onto a sidewalk hedge. Katarina said she wished she’d pissed in the face of this one guy who wouldn’t stop talking to her at the party, and Van said that guy probably would have liked it, and Katarina said, Well, I’d poop in it, then, and I knew I’d found my tribe before they even knew my name.

  “Kaui?” Van repeated when I told them. She was the one. She had this hacked bob haircut and ey
es that were both bored and ready to start a fire. “Yeah,” I said. “Volcanoes,” she said, “angry natives.” And I had to laugh. Partly at least because there was no Getting Lei’d, get it or Do you surf and oh the fruit there is unbelievable it ruined me for everywhere else or I’d love to visit Hawai‘i, why did you ever leave. Van had thick arms, right, same as me, only hers jumped with muscle when she did the slightest thing with them. Katarina was the whitest, with sloppy black hair. Skinny like someone had tossed a Nirvana T-shirt on a coat hanger. The pisser was Hao, his blocky Vietnamese torso dressed for yachting, and he joked while he was shaking himself dry that he should start wearing a catheter to the keggers. “Seriously, though,” Hao said. “I heard about Hawai‘i. There are parts of the islands where they hunt white people for sport, right?”

  “Only in the elementary schools,” I said.

  “I like her,” Van said to no one. I was blurred through the fog of four beers and didn’t remember how we’d even left the party together, really. The roar and dogmouth steam of the party and then the quiet night like a sheet thrown over my head, and now we were here. On the concrete embankment of a drainage ditch outside the entrance to a culvert big enough to swallow a truck. Above us, cars blew past on the boulevard. I was three thousand miles from Hawai‘i and anyone who knew anything about my brother, okay, and I’d never again need to be the sister of a miracle. And there was the cocaine, neat on the back of Van’s phone.

  “First time?” Van asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Katarina said, and she went, a quick dip and sniff. Stood and sucked in all the air like she was surfacing from deep ocean. She leaned her head all the way up to the sky and stretched out on the embankment. Let the crown of her skull rock against the concrete.

  Van sliced another line and didn’t say much, and Hao said, “You or me?” and I realized he was asking me. I sniffed up the little mound Van had made and my blood rocketed up into my head and exploded into light. Happiness prickled across my everything. Friendship, I was thinking, right? Love. Feels like this.

  Somewhere far away and right next to me Katarina said, “Let’s do the culvert. We can do the culvert. Guys, guys,” her sharp-teeth smile. A laugh from somewhere.

  “The culvert.” Was it me or Van that echoed it? “Easy.”

  And then we were there, down under the city in the gaping culvert, sprinting and whooping in the blackness. Running our hands along the endless baffle of steel ridges while our feet slapped through the murk. In my head I’d be like: There’s a turn just up ahead, if we go far enough we’ll see light. But the culvert just kept getting darker, the smell of batteries and old laundry. So dark my eyes were making things up: globes of red and blue flittering in my eyes when I blinked. Dry scratching and skittering on the walls in front of us, animals departing in the dark. The feeling that something was always just ahead. It could’ve been a cement wall. A fence of wire coming undone into a sheet of daggers. Didn’t matter, said my beating body. We’d boom through whatever headfirst, all hard bones and hot power. Locomotives. What was this train we’d made ourselves into so quickly? It was roaring me away from Hawai‘i. Then and now. And yes that was what I wanted: San Diego, yes; goodbye, the islands, the gods, legend of Nainoa.

  We did this many times that year. We never found the end but we always found our way back.

  I was an engineer at school, or anyway studying to be one. There were books, doorstop books with page-long equations. They chewed into my spine when I set them in my backpack and the titles were profound and sexy, right, like Fundamentals of Engineering Thermodynamics. Plus I was always in the labs: places with wood-paneled walls, old glass beakers, peeling tables of commonly used physics equations taped to the walls and corners of desks. And boys. Always, always boys. Whole classes, boys shaped like teddy bears or tree lizards. Always first to pull out their opinions, shove their knowledge at each other. I guess there’s many ways engineering could feel but mostly it felt like any place feels where there’s twenty boys and three girls. I had to go in with my back like a rod. Be the baddest bitch is what I said, in my head. And then did.

  Sometimes I would sit by the other two girls in class—Sarah, Lindsey—but us being together felt like we were all doing it because we thought we needed to. And after a few choppy conversations? They were so haole—Idaho or North Dakota or whatever—it was obvious they’d never even sat that close to a brown person before. Meaning I was on my own, right, but whatever, I liked it. Until a few weeks into class we started group work and since I’d iced out the girls I was grouped with a bunch of boys.

  Group work the way I remember: Phillip with his raging boner for the sound of his own voice, always the first to pipe up with the proposed solution. The rest of us sitting around the table as he drove forward with scribbling on the final sheet. I’d do all the homework problems myself separately—the only way I was sure I’d understand everything anyway—so he and I were always getting into it. It reminded me of Nainoa, the way when we talked now he had an answer for everything, just bulldozed whatever I was going to say until our calls degenerated into snark and cheap shots for the weak places in each other’s armor.

  In group work it would go something like this: “Wrong frictional coefficient,” I’d say. And Preston or Ed would sigh, and here comes Phillip.

  “No it’s not,” he’d say.

  “Look,” I’d say, and start to write out the equation again, explaining how the final speed he’d calculated made no sense in the given context.

  And if it became clear from arguing that I was right, Phillip would start talking about how what I’d said originally was phrased incorrectly, okay, and so what he was really talking about was this other thing. Or that he meant I’d balanced the equation incorrectly, not that the final answer was wrong. “The math you were doing before was in the wrong order.”

  Or sometimes, through just enough grinding him down, I could prove that I was right. But by then Phillip would just come back with, “Calm down.” His hands up like I was pointing a gun at him. “You’re overreacting.” Preston or Ed would shrug and the shrug would feel like a nod and I’d want to fart all over all of them.

  “Call of Duty 4 is coming out this weekend,” Preston offered once, as a white flag. Or maybe it was that other kid in the group. Gregory, was it? It didn’t matter who said it. They were all capable at any moment of saying something like that, right. I mean they even smelled the same. Cheese that had been licked by a dog and then left out overnight.

  I sighed. “What,” I said, “is Call of Duty 4?”

  Quiet for a second. The sense they’d all be happy if only I’d step out of the room and never come back.

  “I’m definitely getting it,” Preston went on. “I’m going to stand in line tonight at Best Buy.”

  “Who isn’t?” Phillip said, voice full of excitement.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  Silence again. A chair scraped, the circle closing just a little, me on the outside. As far as I was concerned, just go for it, boys. But not Ed. Ed the courageous one. He took his cue, when the others hunkered together. Came over and sat down at the desk next to me. His weak chin and fruit-punch-red lips. “Kaui,” he said, like it was a word he had practiced in the mirror. He hunched closer and nodded. “I’m not buying Call of Duty, either.”

  “Oh God, Ed,” I said. “I’m not going to let you touch my vagina.”

  Plenty days I’d lift my head from one of my textbooks, some opaque corner of the library. Faint smell of paper decaying into must, wood glue, and cold steel. Me greasy with lack of sleep, eyes charred from too much reading. And I’d realize it had been forever since I’d danced hula.

  I figured there would never be hula here, but there was. San Diego had hella Hawai‘i people, closest you could get to the islands without falling in the Pacific, I guess. I went to find them once, I did. All the Hawai‘i kids in the university club. They did hula on the quad in the bright months of the year and it would’ve been so easy to get wr
apped in with them. Their hapa Hawaiian, Japanese-Portuguese-Tongan, Spanish-Korean brown skin under pilling hoodies from high schools whose whole reputation I knew. Mynah-bird laughter and Nah for real, got musubi we’re making tonight or You heard the latest Jake Shimabukuro, was nuts, yeah, and barefoot in their dorm rooms, Bocha at night of course, all the other things that were as much a part of me as my bones, but that felt wrong now, somehow.

  I knew they’d know Nainoa, or Dean, all the legends I didn’t want to be mine. If I stayed with those kids and did my hula, what then? Old Hawai‘i life would slip back into me like a sleeping pill. Sludge me down until I was just another member of the club. Just again his shadow, shaped like a sister.

  But then there was the climbing: That day when in the bland and heavy, pancake-smelling dining hall Van said to Katarina, “I bet you she can climb. You think?” And Katarina said, “Let’s find out.”

  Van’s friend had a car he’d gotten on the cheap. A busted-up Japanese sedan from who knows what year, right. Bumper duct-taped and fence-wired back to the frame. All the seat belts cut or chewed or sawed or burned off, a radio that sounded like electrocution. Upholstered in, okay, a vague armpit smell. All that mattered was it had four seats and a trunk big enough for our climbing gear and that Van’s friend had this communal key he’d leave around like a treasure hunt and if you found it you could drive the car. If it was still in the lot and hadn’t been towed.

  It was still in the lot. We took it north. It was a golden early California hour. We had the windows down like you do in Hawai‘i and everyone’s hair was bucking with the beat of the wind, except Hao, his swirled explosion of spiky hair too short and stiff to move much. We stayed in the left lane all the way, the billboards and the barbed-wire lots and the shitty endless sameness strip malls slipping in and out of view with their stucco white. And the matchstick-brown-and-sagebrush hills. Until Van blinkered us off the 5 and it wasn’t until the loop and drift of the turn gave me gravity in my belly that I realized we’d been doing above ninety the whole way.