Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  I’m busy laughing in the mirror when Kaui says, “Look at this.”

  I go over to her, careful to crawl under the front window. She’s got the picture box cracked open and she’s holding a picture, Noa and Khadeja at the beach. Khadeja’s all leaned back on her arms in the sand, carameling in the sun with the same swirling set of cornrows running up her head to a Afro ponytail in the back. She’s laughing at something we can’t see. Doing it with kind of this mana, like she’s not gonna be laughing if she doesn’t want to, and there’s a spray of water on the small rolls of her belly. “Well, damn,” I say all soft.

  Kaui sighs. She snatches the picture back. “God, Dean.”

  “What?”

  “Does every female relationship you have start and end on the tip of your dick?” She doesn’t even wait for me to answer. Just goes back to slapping her way through the stack of photos and shakes her head at me. There’s a scrap of paper comes off one of the pictures. Khadeja, it says, then a phone number. I slip it before Kaui sees.

  “There’s you and me,” I say. “That’s a female relationship with no dick.”

  She flips through more pictures. “Like that’s something,” she finally says. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Whatchyou mean?” I say.

  She stops flipping through the photos and looks up, across the room from us. “Twenty-four point four,” she says, and I know right away, points per game, and I try for say but she goes on in this tired voice, “Twenty-four point four. A blend of carbohydrates and poly-and mono-unsaturated fats, along with normal servings of the food pyramid, total up to three thousand calories for a peak-performance athlete. Nahea, Reese, Trish, Kalani, in missionary, doggy, sixty-nine, cowgirl, and money shots, respectively. USC and Arizona scouts at the Lincoln Invitational, UT Austin and Oregon scouts at your opening game at states.” My points per in high school, the diet Coach had me on once we knew I had a chance at college, some of the girls I did in high school, scouts at my high school games, I don’t even have for think any of it. I just know it when she says it, That’s me, all those facts wrapped around me like my skin. She turns her eyes on me. “I could keep going.”

  “Yeah, well,” I say. “Still wasn’t enough.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The box where she got the pictures from, I can see other Noa stuff in there—the Stanford diploma he got in less than three years, few newspaper articles about big science and math scholarships he got, chemistry competitions and mentions in the Stanford magazines and all like that, a pile that just keeps going—and part of me still feels like starting there, telling Kaui, It’s us versus him, remember? But something about all that is gone now in both of us. Used to be me and Kaui didn’t even have for say it to each other, you could tell we was both burning about Noa, all that he got that we didn’t, but came a time we stopped talking like that. I could almost say that was the only thing me and Kaui had, especially with how she’s talking now, but that’s wrong. While we’re sitting here I get this feeling. It’s just like what I’d get at Spokane, when I’d go back on the court way after the interviews and the showers, when there was no more music and no more crowd, no more rush. From the locker room I’d cross the curved hall with the polished concrete floor, had the glass cases with trophies from the fifties and black-and-white pictures of haoles in high and tight shorts playing basketball, and I’d open the door into the bright-ass court, and there was the facilities crew digging garbage out the chairs and sweeping up all the crowd shit from the game. See it that way and it’s easy to figure, the court is just a building and the game doesn’t matter, not to everyone. It’s the same now, with Kaui: she’s been on the other side, another world, the whole time.

  “I get it,” I say. I cough, just to get another sound out, to not stop. “I was famous. But I been paying attention to you, too.”

  She purses her lips. “If you say so.”

  “Like,” I start, but I don’t really know what’s gonna come out, since I don’t actually know much about her, but it’s too late to stop now, “I know you—I know you like girls.”

  Her face. Just for a second it’s like I threw a bucket of ice-cold water on her. But she fixes it fast, back to something that’s supposed to be tough or whatever. “Dean, what the hell?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say.

  “I know it doesn’t matter,” she says. “I don’t need you to tell me that.”

  “No, not like that,” I say. “I’m saying I bet there’s plenty people it does matter to, yeah?”

  She’s sitting on the floor with her legs straight out, but now she slides both her legs up so her knees is bent to her chest and she can hold on to ’um. “Of course,” she says.

  “Make a list, all those people,” I say. “I’ll kill ’um. Even their dogs. Matter fact, I’ll do the dogs twice.”

  She busts out laughing. “You’ll slay them with your incredibly bad math skills?” she says. I know she’s joking, but it doesn’t feel like that.

  “Bad joke,” she says, I guess when she sees my face. But when I don’t say nothing, she lifts back up some of the pictures and starts going through them again.

  I kick the box she’s taking pictures from. “Don’t act like that,” I say. “I was the one that had for stay down in the valley, looking for him for weeks, mosquitoes and cold nights camping in the rain, while you was studying at school. I was the one that had for see where it happened, then go tell Mom and Dad after.”

  She puts down the pictures. “Sorry,” she says.

  Sorry sorry sorry, I think. Everyone’s always sorry. You’re not the one that fucked up again and again and again.

  “What was it like?” she asks, her voice quiet.

  “What was what like?”

  “Him,” she says. “Dying.”

  I lean my head back against the wall, next to the window. There’s still weak light coming in. “You mean—”

  “—I mean the place. Where you found him.”

  There’s the valley. It was going from hot to cold to hot again, since the clouds was moving fast overhead, but I was all sweating from the trail, and the ground was ripped up and smeared, like someone had started for sweep the whole world off the edge of the cliff but stopped before they was finished, and I go to the edge and look over, there’s crampy ropes coming in my stomach because I see fabric and reach for ’um, the blood all squeezing my skull when I hang upside down for extra length. There’s the backpack in my hand, there’s the boot, there’s the blood.

  “Dean,” Kaui says again. She scoots herself over and touches my shoulder. Everything goes out of me.

  I say one sound, more like a breath: Ah. It gets something going. When I got there—to where he fell—it was like for just a minute all of me and all the valley was touching each other. Had a feeling like I got before on the basketball court. A chanting sound somewhere. Like when I first got to Spokane, or like that one Hawaiian Night game during the regular season, when I got that green feeling, like I could feel all the old kings right inside me, coming across the water.

  “You ever think you felt things the way Noa felt ’um?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?” Kaui says.

  “Sometimes I get this feeling,” I say. “Or I used to, anyway. Where it was like I was me and then I was something bigger than me, all at once.”

  I check her face and the yes is right there, I can see ’um. Like maybe she didn’t get just what I got, but she got something. Hell, no, Noa wasn’t the only one. Makes me smile, even.

  “It’s funny,” I say. “Noa told me this one time he thought the sharks wasn’t just for him. I never really believed him . . .” I wait just a minute, try hard to feel it. To listen. But there’s nothing.

  “I think maybe I missed it,” I say. “Like it was looking for me, same as him, and I never figured out how to answer ’um.”

  Kaui starts talking, but a shadow moves over the window next to us. It’s big, like we can feel the
person in the room already. Kaui’s on her feet and checking the peephole. “Oh, no,” she says.

  I’m all, “Who is it?” but she’s already backing away from the door. I hear keys jingle, then grinding in the lock.

  I stand up. Kaui shoves me with her hand, says, Go go go, and there’s no more talking, we just start for run.

  27

  KAUI, 2009

  Portland

  Go is what I say. Or think I say. We’re up and frenzied. We grab whatever we can—our wallets and my backpack, two of the smaller photo albums—and bolt. The front door opens. There’s a voice but we don’t stop to listen. We reach the bedroom I broke in through, window still open. I heave myself out. Fall into the slurping lawn that runs behind the duplex. My backpack’s open, so painkillers and wadded tissues and sticks of gum and tampons spill out. I gather what I can, jam that and the photo albums in the backpack.

  “Around the corner,” I say to Dean, and we go around the corner. Except when we do we practically run into the Sheriff’s chest. He trips backward and a hand goes to his gun, he’s calling, Stop stop stop. We explode the other way, through the yard toward the gap between a garage and another house. The rain is spitting into my eyelashes. I can’t blink it away, things go blurry. The Sheriff’s hollering behind us. We hear the jingle of those keys. We keep running, but I’m clenched for the shooting to begin. They always shoot at people like us.

  But we make it to the gap and out the other side. Noa’s sweatshirt is swimming and sucking on me, too big and getting wet. When we don’t hear the Sheriff, I stop and look back the way we came. He’s far away, running to his car. My hair is starting to drip all over me. My breath smokes in the cold.

  “Go,” Dean says, and we do, again. Only I don’t realize he means different ways: when I break across the next street, Dean goes for something kitty-corner, through a yard, and by the time I realize it, he’s already on a fence, scrabbling halfway up and over.

  The Sheriff’s car comes hot down the street, lights boiling bright. No sirens, which makes it feel nothing like a movie. It’s real, we’re real. I turn and run my way. There’s a break between two houses and I go for it. Dog growls crack out and roll over me, bounce around the walls on either side, but whatever’s there I can’t see and nothing lunges. I don’t stop. There’s a tire squeal. A metal crunch. It’s all behind me. What I see is in front of me, the wide-open land past the houses.

  I’m out. It’s just an empty lot. So much space and air it’s like the world’s taking a breath. Stacks of lumber under blue tarpaulins and little wooden stakes stabbed into the cold dirt, orange ribbons twirling from their ends. I leave the lot and turn onto a new street and run another block and cut through to another yard. There’s no sound at all. I heave in oxygen. My left backpack strap is loose and I yank it down tight on my shoulder.

  Right beside me is a set of patio furniture. The sort of thing most of my classmates in San Diego probably own, modern and minimal and violently expensive, right? Like, there are all these plates of gray stone in the ground, making up a walkway that goes from the patio through the lawn to the driveway. In the driveway is an idling car. There’s no one inside the car.

  I hear the Sheriff’s siren. Howling now. The part of me that wants to run is grabbed by the part of me that’s smart and it says: You see what you need. Go slow. Act like this is your neighborhood. Like this clean white sedan with butter-leather interior is your car.

  And then it is. I pop the driver’s door, slip into the seat, crank the car into reverse. Funny. You think a thing like car theft is something incredible, all complicated screwdriver technique and dark parking lots and hammering pulses, okay? But it’s as easy as flicking a switch.

  I back out of the driveway fast and gun the engine down the block, screech the first turn so that I feel all my insides swing. But then I say again: Go slow. This is your neighborhood. You’re on the way to the grocery store. I start looking for Dean. I turn a few more corners, try to see anything I recognize. Easy slow loops across each block. I think I’m generally going toward where we separated. The Sheriff’s siren goes again. Not here, but closer. I keep thinking of how when I saw the police lights and knew they were for me, right? My heart moving the same as the lights, skittering and spinning.

  Dean comes out from behind shaggy hedges in front of me. He’s limping with his head down, chest naked and wet where Noa’s raincoat blooms open. One hand is clutched on the waistband of Noa’s sweatpants, which he can only keep halfway up his ass. I pull up close and honk and roll down the passenger window.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  I imagine how it must look. Me, his enraged sister, sleep-starved and food-starved and panicked, rolling up in a white luxury sedan with a 109.5 The Prayer bumper sticker, stinking of floral air freshener. “Get in,” I say.

  He’s in the passenger seat and we drive down to the end of the block. This doesn’t feel real. I’m watching a brother and sister try to escape, catching crime, making the wrong choices. But it’s not me, nothing to do with me except to try and tell them no.

  “You stole this car?” Dean says. I turn on the windshield wipers. For a second my view is completely clean.

  “It was there,” I say, and shrug.

  I stop at a sign that says Stop.

  “Are you kidding me?” He’s looking around. He says we’ll get arrested for real now, we have to dump the car. But I say no. We’re going to get out of here, the whole state and the whole continent and all of it, everything that started from before that fucking kiss, the climbing and the culvert and every square of earth Van and I ever stood on together, and the sharks and the news and all the parts of Hawai‘i that killed my brother.

  I’m still driving.

  “We can catch the bus, we can hitchhike. We can walk, even.” Dean’s pinching his nose. “Not this.”

  I stop at another intersection. The road we’re on goes long, and down at the end of it you can see a busy street, a row of businesses. Bougie clothing stores with gossamer fabrics and jaunty mannequins, I bet. A six-dollar coffee shop. The avenue and the buildings and the sky all the same shade of gray.

  “Go if you want,” I say. “I know the way back.”

  Dean’s quiet. He chews his lip and shifts in his seat so we can share a look. Something funny settles in his eyes, right? Scared but then dead calm, almost relaxed. He lunges for me and then darkness and something jamming into my chest and he’s pulling me, his knee cracks my skull, and buckles or knobs jam and scrape over my ribs and hip. Every edge of me is hitting something but my brother keeps pulling, pushing. I’m folded up. His feet and his hands as he’s jamming me under him and crawling into the driver’s seat. I figure my back will hit the passenger door, but it’s just air. Sharp slap of my shoulder on asphalt. Water and light and my backpack pitches out in front of me. I’m out of the car, in the street. By the time I’m able to stand up, Dean’s in the driver’s seat and piloting the thing forward with the passenger door still open. And there’s the Sheriff’s car, coming straight at him with the lights and siren. The Sheriff’s car swerves sideways, screeches to a stop across both lanes. Dean’s blocked.

  While I’m standing there another cop car blows past me. The engine yelling. The car filling whatever exit Dean had left behind him. The brake lights go when the officer sees that they’ve got him.

  PART IV

  REVIVAL

  28

  MALIA, 2009

  Kalihi

  Picture this, the mother and the father still living after you’re lost, where every day feels like a fog: no way forward, no way back, no idea which is which, everywhere the cold heavy colorless feeling of floating, alone in the middle of nothing. Picture the work they do anyway, the father heaving the luggage from the belts to the shuttles to the airplane bellies, steel flashing in fluorescence, the blast of sun and clean high burning smell of jet fuel, the dull rumble of departures and arrivals. The mother with the hours of torque on her back as she captai
ns the city bus from salty beachside streets into the cool green orderly neighborhoods and back again, glass high-rises downtown flashing like knives, the shudders and bangs and shoves of the road. This way and that. Picture the call that arrives, it is always a call, this one about the other son, charges and detainment in the county facility while awaiting arraignment, the policies and procedures as foreign as the land—Oregon—on which they’re being implemented. Picture the incapability, the lack of money and work schedules and the distance, and how the mother and the father have nothing to do but listen from afar as their daughter describes what’s coming.

  Picture the father’s mind, drained as a reservoir in a drought, now comprehending another loss, the other son, who was perhaps farther away than the father ever thought, more than a phone call, more than a plane ticket, and getting farther. Picture the animated glitter of a healthy mind at work, and then that same mind—the father’s—locking up, sputtering and choking on circumstance. Going black.

  Does the wife see? She sees the start, the long night journeys, the husband’s whispers to ghosts she does not know. But she cannot see it all, cannot know exactly how the madness seizes the husband at his place of employment. Perhaps he staggers from the luggage line out into the striped grids of the tarmac, the flight patterns, and endangers whole crews and passenger loads and himself. Perhaps he wanders instead to the chain-link fence, desperate for the midnight mountain prayer garden he’s been digging; perhaps he just sits, and sits, and sits, and mutters to himself in the break room while the luggage piles up and spills over on a shorthanded day, the other luggage handlers screaming his name, demanding he get back to it. The wife doesn’t see this, she only sees that his uniform stops leaving the closet, that their car stops leaving the Kalihi curb of home, and the bank account starves.

  Picture the corporate conversation, the mother begging, something she thought she’d never do, the airline company executive saying, We’re sorry, we can’t. He wasn’t fit to work here anymore.