Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  “He’s still up there somewhere,” I say. “Not like he gets a break just because it’s raining.”

  “We have to go back,” the SAR woman says. She turns the dog. The dude with her, the other SAR guy, who’s Japanese but pretty big and cop-looking, turns, too, and steps back down.

  “I’ll sleep on the goddamn trail,” I say, but I’m already talking to their backs, everyone else going back down the trail. Leaving my brother or his body—no, my brother—to whatever this storm brings.

  “Pussies,” I say. No one listens.

  By the time we get back to base camp the rain is coming down gray and steady and the clouds washed out any of the sun. The tents are all up close together under some other trees, out past them there’s the lake and plenty bushes.

  Dad’s talking with Uncle Kimo-them about running the Zodiac around to Waipi‘o Valley so they can get out and grab some more gear, and the SAR team’s all off talking together near their tents, and so I’m just standing alone, in the small rain under the ironwood trees.

  For the first time I’m really starting for think Noa might be gone. Already I been thinking about all the things I wanna say sorry for, all the times I tripped him or pushed him or made anything in our house a weapon I could try on him when we was small. All the times I wanted for make him think I was the one with all the mana, even when we both knew that wasn’t true. There was this one philosophy class I been in at the university, where the professor was talking about force. He said people think force and power is the same thing, but really force is what you use when you don’t got power. I think about me and Noa and I’m like, I been using force my whole life. What does that make me?

  The SAR helicopter is coming in for its people. As it comes down, the blades whack through the air and each beat hits me in the chest, going all the way through, out my ears, even though I’m probably three hundred feet away. The helicopter’s striped all yellow and red and it’s not a Blackhawk or like that, the ones in movies, it’s smaller, a beetle without wings. It’s loud. Each beat cracks the sky and then underneath that there’s a silvery whine. The grass all washes back and flaps at the edges. The SAR team and their dog run to it with their heads ducked, their jackets snapping in the wind and the rain, and the lady in front, the one with the dog who told us we had to stop looking for my brother, she’s clamping her hat to her head, and she and the guy behind run with that funny ducked-head, creeping-robber run, and they climb up and the blades run faster and crack harder, and all the grass leans away as the SAR team rises up and swings outta the valley.

  20

  MALIA, 2008

  Kalihi

  Me and Augie both had to come back to Kalihi a week ago. We left the Big Island to return to our another-day-another-dollar life, not our choice, because I know my son is still alive, somewhere in those valleys, and I want to be there when he makes it back out. But we would’ve lost everything—our jobs, the pathetic rusting house we rent, our junker car—if we’d stayed on the Big Island another day. So we’d stuffed back up our duffel bag and suitcase and stood in the gravel outside Kimo’s place with the early-morning bird burbles and chirps, the cool vanilla skies.

  “We gonna find him,” Kimo said, the white of his eyes browned from all the sleepless nights in the valleys, bushwhacking and tramping beside Augie.

  “Yeah,” Augie said. “We going to, one way or the other.”

  “Nah, come on,” Kimo said, placing his meaty paw on Augie’s shoulder.

  “You know,” Augie said, “maybe not. Maybe he’s gone, yeah? Maybe one of the valleys swallowed him whole.”

  “Come on,” Kimo said. “No be like that.”

  “Or maybe,” Augie started—I could see him trying to hold his face, and not let it break—“if he’s gone, we can try again.” He grinned, reached out, and goosed my ass. “We can make another Nainoa, yeah babe?”

  And then he broke with laughter.

  “You dirty, panting dog,” I said, laughing with them. “Always thinking about burying your next bone.”

  “I cannot help,” Augie said, and giggled. “Let’s go inside real quick for something, Malia. Ah, Kimo, try wait here for five minutes.”

  “Augie!” I said, but we couldn’t stop laughing, all of us.

  That laughter carried us through the truck ride with Kimo, through the ranch hills and leaning trees and back sides of the valleys in Waimea, past the fingernails of beach and black flaking lava fields of South Kohala. But eventually we had to stop, of course, at the concrete and screaming engines of the airport, where it was impossible to not feel like we were abandoning our child. The plane took off and we arced along the clouds and landed back in a Honolulu that that seemed to have become both empty and dangerous. Everything could take something from us now; we had so little left.

  I am still here, I remind myself. I am still here, and so is my son, I swear it.

  Days went with no news, only that Dean and Kimo and a few others are still searching, and here I am now, driving my bus back to the station at the end of another shift. Empty and large, shuddering and cannonballing along the night roads. The most peaceful time of my day. I like to ride dark, turn off the seat lights and the cab, so that it’s just the instrument lights on the dash. There’s something soothing about the sheer weight of what I pilot.

  I’m halfway down the Pali, almost to the Nu‘uanu turnoff, and from between the trees, below the sloping green shoulders of the Ko‘olaus around me, Honolulu is swelling into view, the yellow-and-red haze of lights in the night.

  The bus headlights sweep brightly ahead of me, showing asphalt, more asphalt, then guardrail, and then they catch a figure on the highway ahead. It is a man, stooped and almost naked, only a malo cloth wrapped around his hips and boto, then barefoot and bare legs and bare chest, dark-dark skin. He wears a lei po‘o on his head, leaves spiked out in a crown, although his head is tilted strangely to one side, his eyes in black shadow.

  I start to brake, then blow the horn. The man just stands. His whole body slips and shudders, flickers like a television signal that’s partially interrupted by bad weather, then jumps forward to ten feet in front of the bus. I see the salt crusting his chest, his palms lashed with purpled skin, the sort of rope-handling scars we never see anymore. I slam the brakes and there’s a terrible squeal and shake and then the surging of my body thrown forward against the seat belt. The bus jerks to a stop.

  I didn’t feel anything I didn’t hit anything I didn’t feel anything. The headlights show an empty road ahead.

  Holy shit.

  I pull the bus over and press the hazard lights. The blinkers tick-tock away. The brakes spit air, shishhh. I throw the door lever, the flap and squeak as the front door folds open. I step down each steel stair and into the thick night air. There’s nothing caked to the front of the bus, no dents or bloody smooches or burst body.

  I look behind the bus, where the remains of the man should be if I ran him down. He’s still there, a black silhouette stark against the pale reflection of moonlight on the highway. But he flickers again, shudders and twitches, and then there is only a pig, hip-high and thick with fur and mud, which bellows and squeals and grunts off the highway, into the ferns and trees on the side of the road.

  Headlights come. A car blows past me and the bus, shoulder-parked on the highway. I stand for a long time, hoping the ice will leave my spine, hoping the tumbles of my pulse will mellow. I’m reminded of how it felt that night so long ago, Augie and me in the valley making love, then the night marchers. This man was not a night marcher, but I know he came from the same place, the edges of the natural world, which humans never have access to. I can feel the heavy press of sleeplessness on my skull, that I’m almost delirious with sleep starvation and the numbing of the bus route. I stay that way for I don’t know how many minutes.

  I’m slow coming home. I feel thick and dumbstruck. If I saw what I saw then I wonder why it happened now, so many years since the last ghost we’d seen, hundreds of miles
away on the Big Island. I wonder what Augie will say, what I can tell him—he believes much less than I do, it seems like everyone does—and I realize I’m hoping that telling it will somehow make it true enough that it wasn’t some half-crazy dream.

  By the time I get the bus to the depot and drive our rattling Jeep Cherokee back to our house in Kalihi it’s as dark as the night will ever get. I park in our driveway and I bang through the front door of our house. All the lights are on, so is the television, but quickly I can tell Augie is not home.

  Of course.

  It started happening soon after we got back from Honoka‘a and the search for Noa. Augie has been getting up early—two, three in the morning—and then he walks out of our house. I don’t know where. He leaves and comes back hours later, creaking through the house to our bedroom and bringing with him the trail: leaves in the hallway, the dank smell of earth and ferns on his skin. His knees popping when he eases himself to the edge of the bed, where he often pauses and I can feel the jumps of him crying silently.

  I haven’t said anything to him about it yet. I don’t know why. This secret of his walks feels so delicate between us, as if the entire weight of what we’re becoming rests on a few thin threads of privacy. But, then, he also believes Nainoa is dead; I know our son is still alive. We talk about it indirectly but never come at it full in the face. And so he walks and grieves, alone. Augie has never let me see that part of him. There’s always his laughter or his brow split with worry and labor, but never the ragged teeth of full grief.

  The thought comes to me all of a sudden: God, these men. Why is it they always pull their hurt up inside themselves, gulp it down into the quiet corners of their soul, clench it like a muscle? Nainoa did it—does it—with his valley retreat, but before that how he’d shut down on the phone, a flat voice and easy words, Everything is fine over here in Portland, just another day of car accidents and domestic violence, but when you saw him play his ‘uke you knew he had a heart ready to burst. And Dean does it, too, with all his slick talk and joshing everyone, a tough front with simple answers, but his eyes are always glimmering with the shine of his basketball memories. He never hit me again after that first time—was never violent in the house again at all—but that didn’t stop me from remembering that he’d become someone capable of losing control. And now here’s my husband. He’s all jokes all the time, of course. When we first started together I loved it more than anything. He’d joke and giggle and the giggling would bubble over into my own lungs, until we were both laughing to tears. I’ve learned that laughter is the first wall he puts up against the hurt of the world. The walking he’s doing now is what comes after that wall is smashed apart.

  But now I am here, and he is here, standing at the door, letting it creak closed behind. His lids are heavy, his eyes cracked with red, but those great cheeks of his are still strong and round. He’s wearing a shirt that grips his chest, and there’s the outward stretch of cotton from the solid brick of his belly, the one part of his body that’s grown slowly, but steadily, since we’ve been married, and an old pair of faded jeans that are about to go at the knees. The sun-heated shine of his dark-brown skin, even at midnight. He steps out of his slippers and wipes a hand across the thin mustache he’s let sprout.

  “Where were you?” I say.

  “Out,” he says. “Out out out. Out . . .” The sound drifts. He walks past me to the kitchen. I feel the argument starting to rush hot to my face as I follow him into the kitchen.

  “Will you talk to me, for once?” I say. “You don’t talk to me anymore.”

  His head’s in the refrigerator. It’s like he didn’t even hear me, his fingers drumming the top of the refrigerator door.

  Who knows how many seconds he’s like that, staring into the refrigerator. I swear I can feel the cold from it looping through the whole room. But he stands, the door open, his fingers drumming, long beyond the time it would take anyone to look through the whole refrigerator. “There’s nothing in there,” I say. A jug of milk, always—always—on its final third; limp lettuce that we’ve been stretching for well over a week; a cheap plastic tray of huli-huli chicken with its glazed and blackened skin that Augie’s been nibbling at for the last two days; half a bag of carrots; the last beer in a six-pack, the plastic rings looped around its neck like it’s the last catch of the day; and then the ketchup and mayonnaise and four eggs and the other little things, none of them whole.

  “There’s never nothing in here, yeah,” he says finally. “Just this little chicken,” he says, pointing to the leftover huli-huli. “Little chicken. Little chicken little chicken little shit little chicken shit.” He says that last part so that you can almost hear an “e” in it. Shet. I hear him whisper chicken shit, chicken shit, just barely audible. There’s a serious look on his face, as if he’s looking at the first page of a test for a class he wished he’d studied better in.

  He scratches his belly, his shirt piling up on his wrist. The prickly sound of his fingernail over his hair, and he’s looking at the kitchen wall. I wait. Sometimes Augie gets to what he wants to say the long way, talking about sports and a fishing trip and the color of the awful shirts at Hilo Hattie’s, or how many tourists he saw down by Kalakaua Avenue when he went to see old friends that lived just off Waikiki and then suddenly he’ll be talking about how he loves me and missed the way my hair fanned out across both our pillows at night.

  But it doesn’t happen. Augie shakes his head, something he’s remembering that he won’t say. The realization comes to me: he is cracking, inside; I’m losing him.

  “You heard that?” he says. He pivots toward the hall, our bedroom the rectangle of light at the other end, where the ceiling fan is creaking out a constant beat. “Like a song.” And when he says that there’s a flicker of recognition in my head, of what I’ve just seen, and something now that feels the same. There’s the smell, the same smell the man on the Pali left behind: wet ferns, thriving soil, seedy and brown and spicy, a lawn after rain, a field being harvested. It’s coming off Augie.

  “Hey,” I say.

  Augie starts moving down the hall, only says Mmm? over his shoulder.

  “Augie, stop.”

  He disappears into the dark bedroom, and I follow, stopping at the doorway. Augie is sitting on the bed in the darkness.

  “Where did you go?” I ask as gently as I can.

  He starts rolling his shirt off over his head.

  “I was walking,” he says, his lips moving through the threadbare shirt. “All up the way, with the water. Up the way. Toward the clouds, the Pali.

  “Farther back you go, bigger the houses get here, yeah? You and me was gonna get a two-story house, big lanai on top, watch the sunrise. Watch the sunrise. You remember? Here comes the sun, we gonna watch it from our lanai?”

  It was a dream he and I had, a vacation we went to the same way people come to these islands, something they store away for their cold and bitter city winters, the blue-and-gold-and-soothing beauty of something possible in the near future: us on the lanai of our own home, high in the hills, looking down at the island’s green ridges, the ocean after.

  “We never getting that house,” he says. “No no no, chicken shit, we only getting this chicken shit”—he has his shirt off, and he flings it toward the closet doors—“closet, tiny bed, this stink, old, beat-up chicken-shit house. We gonna die just like this.”

  It’s the most clarity his voice has had since he’s walked in the door. He’s coming back into focus. The smell that was here is leaving just as quickly. His hand on his knee is trembling. I kneel down and grasp it. He won’t look at me. I move my knees forward and hug against him, my shoulder under his chin, and a sob jerks from his chest. Another. I want to tell him immediately, what I saw on the bus, how it gives me so much hope. Even now I can feel, the two are connected. What is it he walked to in the night? What is it that’s trying to reach us?

  “Stay with me,” I say to Augie. “Please, Augie, please. Stay with me. Stay.�
� I say it over and over, as if it’s the music he heard, as if it’s what’s been in his head all along.

  21

  DEAN, 2008

  Waipi‘o Valley

  Four weeks is how long it’s been, yeah, which means no job left for me back in Spokane, soon not enough money for my part of the rent, but I don’t care, I go down and up to the other side of Waipi‘o, into Waimanu and beyond. For real I can run the whole trail now, and this morning I’m on at dawn and by the time the first surfers is splitting the ocean at the mouth of the valley I’m most the way up the other side, on the Z-Trail, my legs going like pistons. Below me there’s the whole green valley and the lines of waves rolling in, one after another, cracking across the sand and stone and scraping back out.

  I’m still searching for Noa, all alone now after the SAR team and family and friends had to stop. Sometimes Uncle Kimo and some of his friends come along, but I move so much faster they just get left hours behind.

  For most the time since I left Hawai‘i it didn’t matter what Noa was, because I was all basketball. But when I fucked that up, what was the point of me? Just making beer money at a package-handling company, waiting around for what? But when Mom and Dad had for go back to O‘ahu, or else lose their jobs, and we still hadn’t found Noa yet—there they were on the back lanai at Kimo’s place, both of them with swole faces, red no-sleep eyes, quiet because every time one of them talked they’d just cry—never mind my bad job and ratty little room in Spokane, they needed me again. Here I am. I can still do this, and who knows what it’s gonna make me after.

  I keep moving. Over the crest of Waipi‘o, through the thirteen gullies after that, the cold coming off the streams. When I cross each one I can feel the sore curve of the river rocks on the bottom of my feet, then after there’s mud that sucks at my ankles, stinks like pig, but I keep moving. I speed up, even. Gotta get to the far side of Waimanu and start searching there again.