Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  Steep miles, me down the front side of Waimanu, into the valley, mostly empty except for a few tourists stupid enough to hike here in the winter. Hala plants and gray sand and black-egg rocks the size of refrigerators. All these haoles squatting out by the edge of the ocean, or back by the dirty lake, or the cold-ass waterfall. Makes me shake my head every time. Welcome to Hawai‘i, dumbasses, here’s wet rocks and shitty camp food in an empty valley.

  I go more miles. Up the other side of Waimanu, right on time. I shove a PowerBar into my mouth and chew, my jaw clicking by my ear. I already searched all of these parts of the trail, so mostly I’m running through here. Machete slapping on the outside of my backpack and the ruff ruff ruff cotton sounds of my jeans. My ankles is strong still from basketball. That’s one thing I got. Plus I figure I lost plenty weight, from all the running and hiking and small food since I been searching. No more Korean ribs and white rice. I feel light as hell, moving like a mongoose again, like I got a basketball in my palm.

  But then I slow down. This is the new part of the trail for me. I’ve checked the back of the valley, near the waterfalls, I’ve checked our old campsites and down along the coast. I spent days checking through what looked like little side trails he might have followed, hacking back the new growth, crunching over stiff weeds and heavy grass. Yesterday I found this dying old cabin, I think it used to be from the state-park people or something. Holes in the walls and the ceiling and a sagging floor. He wasn’t there, no sign of anyone, even, but it was as far as I got before I had to turn back.

  This time when I reach that place, there’s something tugging me hard. Got a flow feeling, almost like when I was mongoosing on the basketball court back in the day. Everything around me bends away out my vision and there’s just the one thing, only this time instead of my body moving between players it’s my body moving between trees. The leaves lean away, the ground not sucking me down or rolling my ankles but holding me up, boosting each step, and the vines and the grass I swear start pulling back so this whole new path opens, through the dirt and bugs and green.

  It’s a clearing. The trees and grass go right up to the edge like they didn’t use to stop, and at the edge there’s huge cracked plates of dirt and mud and even rock that’s all chewed off, like it recently broke, and there’s a steep slope for maybe thirty feet before it breaks again into a straight drop a thousand feet into the cracking surf.

  And down that slope before the straight drop I can see this funny lump, poking upside down from some of the dirt. Takes me a minute, but I figure out what it is: a hiking boot. I can’t reach down the slope by myself, too steep, guaranteed the whole thing would pitch me into the ocean. But there’s a tree small enough I can hook my legs around ’um, like I’m riding a horse upside down. I lock in and swing upside down and the dizzy comes into my head, like syrup. But I hang down the slope and can reach the boot, the dirt all torn and the loose plants going below it, over the cliff. I snag the boot with one hand and pull myself back upright. Sit away from the edge. Inside the boot there’s some plants and mud and yeah, just like that, brown stain of old blood, all along the ankle and heel.

  I take a knee. I see what’s right there in my hand, the answer. I check down the slope again. There’s all this colored fabric sticking out from where I yanked the boot out of the dirt. I set the boot down gentle, then I hook my legs around the tree and go upside down again, reach out for the fabric. When I first grab it, the cloth doesn’t come. So I yank and dig and yank and jerk and whole scabs of mud shift and slide away and pitch over the cliff, I hear cracks and hissing. I pull one last time and up comes a backpack. Orange and red and just like Mom and Dad described to the SAR, back when we first started. I pull it up into me, all these ropes of heat and pain along my arms from pulling, and then get myself right side up. My skull is spangling from the upside down.

  I sit cross-legged and set the backpack in my lap. It’s ripped open in a couple places, and when I lift the main flap a food wrapper, like from a trail bar or something, flashes like a knife blade in the light and curls off into the air. There’s a few muddy clothes inside, then part of a camping stove and a few nylon bags with cords and stuff, and when I shift those aside, there’s his ‘ukulele. It’s in a soft case, but when I unzip the case the ‘uke is there, clean and true.

  I set it down like it’s a baby. Next to the boot, where I can see the rusty bloodstain, and behind and far down, the surf cracks and rips against the cliff.

  “You’re back?” Uncle Kimo asks, when I come out of the room at his house the next morning.

  I can’t say nothing, I can’t make my voice. I shake my head.

  “Eh,” Uncle Kimo says. He’s looking at me serious. “Eh, Dean, what happened, brah?”

  I’m shaking. I can’t stop shaking, it’s like I’m run through with that volt that hits at the end of a good session at the gym, the way I used to get after double overtime, just shook with light and juice, ready for jump. Only this one is different, got a blue feel to it, like I know it’s one that’s going come and go and wreck me whenever it feels like it, and I reach out and touch the counter and I start for say, I think I know what happened to Noa, but the words don’t come.

  Why can’t I stop shaking?

  I go back into the room and bring the boot, the backpack, the ‘ukulele, set ’um on the table. Scabs of mud flake down.

  “Okay,” Uncle says, and he blows a good breath. “Okay.”

  Maybe we wait awhile or whatever, Uncle just thinking, then he says, “We gotta get some people, we gotta go get the body. Your parents, too.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “There’s no more body. Just got one place where there was a landslide, broke off into a cliff. There’s nothing else.”

  “What do you mean,” Uncle Kimo says, “nothing? Gotta be something. You went down farther, or what? All the way to the bottom of the slide?”

  “There’s nothing,” I say. “Past where the boot and the backpack was buried.”

  “You have to—”

  I tell him I’m not doing nothing else, not another thing. I don’t have to do one more fucking thing. All this time I been here. Before and since, while everyone else went back to everything they had, I’m in the valley almost every day, sinking down into the mud and shit and centipedes and coming back up, climbing the long wet shining asphalt out Waipi‘o, where I kept seeing the bent guardrails and the busted, black frames of wrecked cars down in the forest below, drunks that went off the road and died making themselves into comets, their leftovers rotting in the trees, it was only me still out there, still searching. All for nothing.

  Back when the sharks first gave us back Noa, I was the first one for reach him on the boat. I don’t talk about it much. That time it was crazy quiet when the sharks came at us, the crew leaning over the railing, seeing the lead shark nudge Noa up against the side of the boat, not biting, not thrashing, just placing him as close to us as they could. Then the captain and his deckhands with their ropes and loops plucking my brother up, and the sharks dropped back, darker darker darker shadows until they became the deep blue. I was right there. The deckhands and Dad pulled Noa over the rail and I bear-hugged my brother hard, while Mom came out of nowhere and tackled us both. Got so that all three of us were crushed up together and there was the smell of mustard and potato chips and fruit punch from our lunch, our pulses beating on top of each other, and our arms and legs crushed together, me and Mom and Noa, like so you couldn’t figure where one of us ended and the other started.

  I was supposed for be the older brother, but after that day it was like every day he was growing up faster, until it was like I was the younger brother. And now here I am, carrying the last piece of clothing to touch his blood. Uncle Kimo’s standing there, looking at me with liquid eyes that’s all shining and trembling.

  “You gotta call your mom and dad,” he says.

  “I will,” I say, and he looks like he doesn’t believe me, because Uncle’s a
smart man.

  “Let me do it my way,” I say. “I found him, not you.”

  “I know,” he says.

  “No you don’t,” I say.

  Uncle Kimo starts for say something, then he stops. He leaves me there and wanders out to the lanai, then past it, out into the yard, with his hands up on his head like he’s trying for get breath after a long run. I go the side table, where he’s still got a landline, and white-knuckle the headset for who knows how long.

  I start for dial Mom. I hang up.

  I start for dial Dad. I hang up.

  I start for dial Mom again. I get to the last digit, but I stop and hang up.

  Uncle Kimo had come back inside, now he’s watching me from across the living room.

  “No one answered, Uncle,” I say. I get up from the table, grab my shoes, and go to the front door.

  “Where you going?” he asks.

  “Out,” I say.

  He crosses his arms.

  “I can call when I get back,” I say. “They’re always up late.”

  “Don’t go thinking you can take my truck,” Uncle Kimo says. “I gotta go back office after lunch.”

  I wave a hand over my shoulder. “Great, thanks for the help, Uncle,” I say. I’m out the front door, down the driveway, up the hill, and thumb-out on the highway. Start walking toward Hilo, and after like fifteen minutes a car pulls up ahead of me along the shoulder. The driver’s this old hapa-Japanese guy, clothes like he’s been working in a garden, and he asks me where I’m going.

  “Anywhere but here,” I say.

  “You have to have a destination,” he says.

  No I don’t, not anymore. I almost say it, but keep it inside instead. “Hilo, then,” I say. “Thanks.”

  In Hilo, I walk around Bayfront and watch the ocean and the breakwater. The water’s all gray and murky, same like Waipi‘o Valley after a storm, only this is a long curved bay, with barges and cruise ships out by one end, where the harbor is, and even farther past that, Coconut Island and the hotels. I watch the trees above me, their spiked fronds clattering lazy. All along the Bayfront road there’s these small-kind old-school businesses, hand-lettered signs and everything. I go into the first bar I can find.

  The bar’s big enough and almost empty anyways. I sit right at the bar and get a beer, it goes down fast and cold with a couple flexes of my throat.

  I order another and the bartender’s like, “Easy, Hawaiian.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” I say. “I’m not driving anyway, howbout I do my thing.”

  “Just go easy.”

  “No worries,” I say. “Nothing gonna happen. I’ll be like the son you never had.”

  “I got three sons and had to kick them all out the house,” the bartender says. “So.”

  I laugh. “Well, I won’t let you down.”

  “They said that, too.”

  I raise my hand like, Enough, and the bartender goes over to polish the chrome part of the counter. Then I figure, this cheap little place, I bet that part of the bar is plastic, fake chrome everything. I almost say that, too, but I’m not that stupid. I bet his sons would have said that.

  A few more beers go, a couple guys come in and sit down at the far end of the bar. I figure they’re from construction, because they both got on hyper-yellow shirts and when one guy raises his arm to signal for a couple of drinks you can see the sharp tan line on his arm. I keep drinking and they keep complaining about their wives or how it’s hard to catch good fish too close to the coast. After a while they’re still going: She always trying to get me to change something, my shirts or my haircut or whether I watch football on Sunday.

  One of ’um looks over at me. Then they go back to talking to each other.

  I stand up and go over next to their stools, lay my hand on the guy’s shoulder. He’s got these small ears and meaty cheeks with some Okinawan-style stubble.

  “Eh, mahu,” I say. “Why the fuck were you looking at me all funny just now?”

  He shrugs his shoulder out from under my hand.

  “You heard me or what?” I ask.

  “Go home,” he says. He doesn’t turn from his drink or his friend.

  “Oh,” I say. “Only you were looking at me just now like you wanted my phone number or something. Guys looking to make a new fag for yourselves?”

  The one guy, the one close to me, sighs, like a dog trying for sleep on the floor. “You’re all buss already,” he says. “Go home.”

  Then to the bartender, “Eh, Jerry, maybe you should cut this guy off.”

  “Your wives sound like real bitches,” I say. “Give me a few minutes with ’um. I’ll straighten everything out. Straighten ’um out to the tips of their toes.”

  Both guys laugh and I think I hear the bartender laughing, too, until he says, “Brah, pay your tab and go piss on a wall somewhere.”

  I take a bunch of money out my pockets. I know it’s all ones and not nearly enough so I flutter ’um over the bar, tell the guys to go suck some goat balls, and push myself out into the afternoon.

  Something’s not right. It’s hard for tell where I am. Sun’s like a headache and my legs is not totally listening to my head. There’s the white stone pavilion in the distance, the round one over by the bus station. I try for turn my body toward it, find something in between to aim my legs at. Got the light post at the intersection, so I make it there and grab the metal and wait for the light to change. Feels like I’ll fall off the planet if I let go.

  The light goes to a walk signal, but someone grips my shoulder and twists me around. It’s the construction moke from the bar. He swings his fist up into my chin and there’s a white explosion in my eyes and I sit down hard on the curb, but I don’t fall all the way over. Just sitting there like I’m relaxing, and the moke stands over me.

  “Not so smart now, yeah?” he says.

  “I’m still plenty—” I start saying, but I figure why finish talking and stand back up and punch him in the throat. He makes that huuuuh sound everyone loves to hear from the person they just hit. The moke staggers back and his knees go all chicken-wobble, but he doesn’t fall down, too.

  Whole thing feels good. I want everything broken.

  So when the moke comes at me again I drop my hands and wait for his next punch. He gives it, and there’s a black crunch and my head sparks again and I tilt and pitch and my shoulder blades smack the sidewalk. I open my eyes and I’m on the ground and there’s the sky and then grass and cigarette butts and plastic wrappers and the moke’s boots, stepping forward. I hear traffic go by in the street behind us. He punches me two more times. My skull feels like it splits open on the concrete each time and there’s all sorts of dull throbbing after. Got red spots dancing in my eyes.

  There’s someone shouting and tires screech to a stop. More voices saying things to each other before the moke says to someone in the street, “Get back in your car.” I think it’s happening behind me. “I just talking with my cousin over here,” the moke says. “He fell down.”

  Mostly my eyes are pointed at the sky, where gray breaks up into blue every now and then, but here comes a shadow over me. It’s the moke standing there, leaning down into my face. “Not so funny now, yeah?” he says, fresh beer fizzing off his breath.

  “Thank you,” I say. I start noticing the hurt, places where it feels like I’m ten inches thick on my forehead, must be new lumps forming. My tongue is like a fully dead whale. “That was perfect,” I say.

  “You sick fuck,” he says. Then he’s gone and it’s just sky again.

  I close my eyes. Someone comes asking if I need help and there’s another voice—a woman’s—saying, “We’re down by Bayfront, over by the bus station. Yeah. Some sort of fight. He’s bleeding a lot.”

  That first voice asks again if I need help. I keep my eyes closed and just listen.

  There’s an ambulance that comes but they don’t take me anywhere, it’s just cuts and bruises and swelling, I still got my brain. They close all my cuts up
right there on the curb, give me some cold-ass gel pack I can press over my lumps, and I cannot believe it, but I make the next bus. Driver doesn’t even flinch when I get on and he sees my bust-ass face. Plenty empty seats, I find one on the sunset side and lay my head back against the sagging headrest. Smell the ashtray stink, hear the old vinyl creak when I squirm in the seat. The inside lights drop down and we leave Hilo.

  22

  KAUI, 2008

  San Diego

  God, please let me forget this winter. First came December, an ugly end to the semester. Me and Van like strangers in our dorm room, functioning off the smallest working vocabulary we could, one-word answers to each other. Trying to be in the room only when the other person wasn’t. Each time we were forced into that tiny space, it felt like something was strangling me, right? We tried our best to get ourselves out of tune, so one of us was coming while the other was going and we were only there when the lights were out and we could sleep away our shared space. Finals in Vector Calc and Physics III and materials in front of me like a guillotine, trembling above the bloodstained chopping block.

  In the middle of that hell Mom called. It was over. Noa was gone. Dean had found a landslide that ended in the sheer edge of a cliff into the sea and that was what had taken Noa to death. We had his backpack and a wrecked boot and that was it. I talked with Mom on the phone and I talked with Dad on the phone and I talked with Dean on the phone. No one had any opinions about the world. The calls were full of quiet space. I think we were focused on breathing. Take this breath, then the next. Each day I tried to sort out the words and symbols in my homework, work that was supposed to be my best shot at becoming something, while all around me the things I’d thought would survive were extinguished. Van gone. Noa gone. Classes next. Let it be.

  But I made it through, in the end. All of it.

  Now it’s winter break. Dean’s back in Spokane, he doesn’t know for how long. We didn’t have the money for me to fly home in the meantime. I mean we didn’t have the money but we did have the money, because I could have floated another flight on my credit cards. But I’d about maxed that out with climbing trips and stupid school things, and flights to Hawai‘i in winter are murder, even from San Diego. So it’s a shit winter break and I start it with a few begged shifts at Romanesque again, which is lucky for me: the first day I go in there, the day before I’m about to get kicked out of the dorms, I meet a waitress named Christie. Her other job is at a hostel front desk. The hostel helps Cali-fever Euro gap-year kids see America, it’s not supposed to be for broke college kids who normally live up the street. But Christie lets me rent a bed for the rest of the break at a higher rate, vouching that I’m just passing through if the hostel owner asks. Most days I catch the bus down to the beach in the middle of the workday. Shiver in the kiss of the chilly sun once the fog burns off the sand, or stay put and bum caustic liquor off the generous Euro kids at the hostel, who are overwhelmingly blond and stupid happy for America. I eat saimin and cheap knockoff cereal and Dollar Menu specials that I double up on and refrigerate. I have one of the bussers at Romanesque saving scraps for me. Look at me, Mom and Dad, I learned how to hustle through osmosis, all those years at home with both of you on the edge of economic cliffs.