After that it was easy. Look. When I was back in Hawai‘i I knew some guys that would do things, move things, without really thinking about it. That’s how I could get what I needed back in high school, these guys already understood was all sorts of things out there you could have if you just had the strength to take ’um. I still know guys like that. That’s where this starts. Then it goes to Trujillo.
Next thing you know Trujillo and probably one or two other guys is bringing things through, doesn’t take much of a markup to make it work, they even got some space at the commissary to store some of it, since it’s not like they can just walk into the office with boxes full of used panties from people’s girlfriends and cocaine, like that. No one knows about the commissary thing except me and Trujillo and his guys. But I mean, it’s not like this is max-security federal with guys in face tattoos and life vows to MS-13 or whatever, it’s got plenty knuckleheads like me, made a few dumb choices or whatever, or guys that just can’t keep it together.
Mostly, anyway, you figure. But then one day Rashad sits down next to me at a lunch table.
“A few of us figured we’d let you know straight,” he says. “Wild Eights is talking about how maybe you should close up shop.”
“Wild Eights,” I say.
Rashad laughs. “That’s right.”
“Like those two fat guys always hanging over by the track at rec? Then there’s that one dude with the big ears—”
“There’s almost always a few of ’em rolling through County at the same time. Usually it’s the new guys since it’s all low-level things. But still.”
“And I take your story on it because . . .”
Rashad had been getting cough syrup through me and Trujillo, another satisfied customer, had some sort of recipe that was getting him as stoned as a rap star. So I guess there’s that.
“Listen, man,” he says. “There’s this guy I know.”
“There’s this guy everyone knows,” I say. “Everyone got a guy they—”
“Listen,” Rashad says. “His name’s Justice. He’s, like, legit. Wears suits, clean fingernails, and all that.”
“And?”
“He doesn’t come down here,” Rashad goes on. “But he’s got guys you can call, they know how to talk to guys like the Eights. Before shit gets serious.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Matter of fact, it already is serious, you just don’t know it yet.”
“So this thing’s turning into, like, Blood In Blood Out all of a sudden,” I say.
“Just saying,” Rashad says. “Probably wouldn’t even come to that in here, shanks made out of spoons and shower mobs. That’s not Justice’s style. Anyway, Negroes in here is just trying to get out, you know? Shit ain’t Death Row.”
“And what,” I say, “you’re telling me how come.”
“Those Wild Eights motherfuckers got their own they help out and that’s it,” he says. “They don’t want to share. Not like you.”
I let a breath go through my teeth, yeah, I can feel the whole thing turning. “I’m not a criminal,” I say.
Rashad laughs, his sharp nose and those happy teeth. Kid could be a model if we wasn’t in here. “I know,” he says. “Me, too. Even Kevin.
“Right, Kevin, what you in here for?” Rashad calls out louder.
“Couldn’t prove nothing,” Kevin says. Dude might as well be in one of those heavy-metal bands, haole boy with his long sharp beard and hyped-up eyes. “Nigger couldn’t prove I was choking him.”
“Love you, too,” Rashad hollers. Turns back to me. “See? No criminals in here. Just perfect gentlemen.”
I sit there, like, forever.
“You want to call?” Rashad asks.
This is another one of those times, right? Just like the car, me and Kaui. Where there’s the one side and the other side, and you take the wheel or not.
“People needed things,” I say. “I got ’um things. That’s all it was gonna be.”
“Yeah, well”—Rashad raises his hands, then lets ’um back down on the table—“it’s more than that, now. Your choice.”
31
MALIA, 2009
Honoka‘a
There’s the remembering I don’t tell anyone about, the remembering I do every day, alone, like this: tucked in the bedroom, burying my nose in the last of your clothes that you left with us before you went into the valley. The shirt is my favorite, because it was pushed farthest back in the drawer, and some of you clung to it, so that I can still smell you strong in the cotton.
No one can tell me not to do this. Not to be close to you this way, to have your scent and think about my son and the hole you’ve ripped in me that feels like it’s doing the opposite of closing. Howl, I want to tell that hole. Swallow the entire world, swallow me, too.
But for just the little bit while I’m here, with your clothes, if I don’t smell too close and I don’t keep my eyes open, it’s almost like you’re back, and we’re in Honoka‘a before that boat ride and the sharks, when your father still had a cane job. We had so many jokes! Dirt and school grades and bills didn’t matter. The news didn’t matter—
“What are you doing?”
It’s Kaui’s voice. You plunge away and I turn to face your sister with open eyes. We both stand still. My hands still on your shirt, which I bring down to my side.
“I could make something up,” I say, “but I think you can see what I’m doing.”
Her mouth opens, but she closes it and crosses her arms.
“You’re judging me,” I say. “Don’t judge m—”
“No,” she says.
“You’ll have to be a mother before you can understand the craziness of it,” I go on. “Until then—”
“Mom! It’s not that.”
“When it’s your child—”
“You’re not listening,” she interrupts again.
I ask her what it is, then. What she saw.
“There’s nothing wrong with missing him, Mom,” she says.
“It didn’t seem like that when you stepped in the door just now,” I say.
“It’s nothing,” she says. “I was just surprised.”
“I don’t believe you,” I say. “I see the way you’re looking at me.” And my voice gets louder.
“Nothing,” she says. She scratches her arm and looks away.
“You walked in and saw me smelling his clothes,” I say. “And then you gave me a look.”
“You’d never do that if it was me,” she says. “That’s all.”
“You mean—”
“I mean if I was gone,” she finishes. “If it was me that was dead.”
“What do you think?” I ask her.
“I don’t think you would,” she says.
Sadness rings through me, sudden and clear. I ask her if she really believes that, and she says of course she does, that she’s believed it since she was young, at Kahena, invisible, she says.
“Oh, Kaui,” I say. “It’s not like that at all. Of course we’d miss you.”
She keeps her eyes away from me, looking at the floor or the wall. One arm crossed over her chest and grabbing the other shoulder. She mm-hmms my answer, softly.
“Did you ever think,” she says, “maybe he wasn’t what you thought he was?”
I’m still holding your shirt. I can still remember you, all of you, the sharks, New Year’s, the neighbors, the graveyard, the way there was a feeling in those things. The edge of some brightness I haven’t felt since you’ve been gone.
I shrug. “He was special,” I say. “Don’t you think so?”
She doesn’t answer. After a few quiet breaths, she leaves the doorway.
Your sister. There’s a lot about her I still don’t understand. So much judgment going from her to me. I see it in her eyes when she comes home from the farm, when I’ve spent hours with your father, listening to his whispering and finding myself watching the small television more and more, anything to drag one hour into the next until I can make my way to all the offi
ces of professionals that need cleaning. She sees me that way and I can tell she thinks I’m lazy, physically and emotionally and mentally.
Maybe she’s right. In my best days I don’t think so, but this isn’t one of my best days.
In the other room, I hear her saying simple sentences to your father, that his bath is ready, that she can help him through all of it.
32
KAUI, 2009
Honoka‘a
I start my days different now. Just me and dad running down the shoulder of the Honoka‘a-Waipi‘o road. It’s one of the ways I take care of him, right? It seems good for him. I seem good for him. But I don’t tell anyone that, okay, maybe not even myself most of the time. I hate so much of this—being home, being something like a nanny or a nurse. It isn’t what I was supposed to be. It isn’t what I’m going to be, someday. But it’s what I am right now.
The first weeks were bad between me and Mom. Lots of cold stare-offs and her making me do things for her—help cleaning, help cooking, help budget shopping with the little money she brings in from cleaning, right. I’d do a bad job, slam things, complain. She’d ask what did I want her to do—I was the one that begged to come back here—and that she’d tried to keep me on the mainland, where I still had a chance.
And that was true, but I don’t belong in San Diego anymore. It’s almost March, almost spring break up there. I’ve sent too many messages to Van. Plus I even called once, my heart going so hard in my throat I thought I’d vomit. But she never responded. She’s probably blocked my number by now. I deserve it.
So this is it: I’m here, a fucking housemaid and a nurse. We run. There goes the pat of our running shoes on the blacktop, right along the guardrail, with the spills of green below and then beyond ocean and horizon. My father’s mind has gone away to someplace young, the way he’s running. He’s looking ahead and his eyes and cheeks are tight with memory of a body that could do this. Now he’s brown and touched by age—moles, deep creases, scars—and thicker than he should be. He’s got his old high school football shirt on, heather gray with Dragons across it in Kelly green, and shorts that are definitely too short, okay? Under his shirt you can see his broad middle ripple with each stride. But the old Augie is there somewhere and we’ve been running ourselves off, him and me. Sweat stains in patches across his chest like calico. His hair clumps and splays from the morning heat and where he’s swiped his hands. He’s still got his trimmed little mustache. These days mostly me or Mom do the trimming.
He’s running and I’m running and I see his eyes looking far ahead. Or far behind, right? He’s thinking of when he was the one in the Friday-night games. Ironman football. Tight end and linebacker both. We pound down the blacktop hills and the long straight flats of the road to Waipi‘o with all the stalks of cane hissing and bowing. Long shadows from the eucalyptus planted on the mauka side. The beat of our breaths and our sweat. The dark smell of the soil. Pink-blue sunrise.
“He’s not getting any better,” Mom tells me, when we’re home, and Dad’s on the porch, staring out at the ocean, out past the hills and Hāmākua cliffs. Uncle Kimo has left for work for the day. I don’t even know what day of the week it is. “Actually, I think he’s getting worse.”
Me and Mom standing at the kitchen counter. Hands wrapping coffee mugs. The steam curling and vanishing, same as our thoughts. Okay, there are two versions of Dad, I know there are: The one that we see now, that is something like a dream trapped in a body. And then there is the Augie that was once a cane-truck driver once a husband once a luggage handler once a father. I’ve seen them both since I’ve been home, is what I tell her.
She smiles. It’s a sad smile. “Me and Kimo figured the same thing with us. Some days your father would spark back to who he was. Like a switch had been flipped, and he was almost normal. But then he’d fall back. After long enough, it stopped being both ways.”
“He didn’t use to go for runs with you, did he?” I say. “He’s still in there, Mom.”
“Maybe,” she says.
“What else can we do?” I ask. “It’s not like we can just drop him off at a care facility somewhere.”
“Don’t insult me,” she says. But there’s no teeth behind her comeback. Shit, maybe she did think about just dropping him off once. She’s looking at her palm. As if it has a message written on it, right? Finally she leans her chin into her hand, cups her jaw.
“He’s better now,” I say. “He’s better with me.”
She shakes her head. “Go ahead and think what you think. I should know better than to try and talk you out of it.”
“Listen to yourself,” I say. “You’re acting like you’re giving up.”
She examines her coffee. The sweet steam of our mugs blows over us. The day is coming full across the lanai. The trade winds and their nightly showers left the plants damp. Now they’re as green as anything could ever be. Okay, I want to tell my mother I’ll keep trying. I want to tell her she should, too. But it’s a conversation we’ve had a million times, and the only answer that ever comes out of it is that we’re never going to have another miracle. I want to scream: Where are all the island gods now?
But she wouldn’t hear me. She never hears me.
It’s tuesday, which means I go to Hoku’s farm. He of the jowly sunburned face and broad-brimmed straw hat. He of the paint-stained, mud-stained, knee-patched jeans and the sort of easy paunch you get from drinking too many beers at pau hana time. I started working for him after that day he found me in the grocery store.
That day I was just standing there in the store, staring at the surprising varieties of paper towels, when he’d started talking to me. “You’re Malia and Augie’s daughter, yeah?” he’d asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“That was your brother, then, d’kine that fell.”
“It was,” I said. “They never found him, though.”
He nodded. “Sorry for your loss.”
I shrugged.
“Some people was telling me you’re looking for one job,” he said.
Shame and distrust prickled my ears. I’d forgotten how people talk when they all know each other. Honoka‘a. “Maybe,” I said.
“Wow, no smiles or nothing?” he asked.
“I’m not your eye candy,” I said. “My face is my face.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Simmer down, Hawaiian, easy. I got this farm I trying for get going. Maybe some aquaponics, maybe some of the normal stuff, lettuce and papaya and like that.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I need people.”
“How much?”
“How much what?”
“How much do you pay?”
He coughed. He rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s the thing,” he said. “I just getting going.”
I almost slapped him. “You’re looking for free labor, so you find the girl whose brother died?”
“I mean,” Hoku said, “there’s stuff I trade for with a few the other farms, they give me their leftover harvest, like that.”
I hate to admit it, but that did get me listening. If there’s one thing that we pay out the ass for, it’s groceries. I could already hear the conversation with Mom: You went away to college and came back to work for what? But it’s not just the food that we’ll be getting. It’s the other part, too, for me. The work. My hands, my head. Making things again, building toward something besides bedsheets and towels and washcloths for Dad. Sometimes people make me feel sorry for wanting more, the same as they did back when I was growing up. But that day in the grocery store I didn’t give a shit. “How much free food?” I asked.
He shrugged. “More than I can eat.”
“Looks like you’ve been trying to see how much that is.” I waved in the vague direction of his belly.
He actually laughed. “I like you,” he said. “Way salty, this one.”
So I work. Mornings I’m at Hoku’s farm. I dig and plow and plant. I trench and lift and wheel and throw. I blister and spl
inter and ache to the stiffest. There’s chicken shit and centipedes that get in my shoes and this warm stink that settles in my hair, right? It’s so hard to get out that I let it stay. Seems like it says clearly what I am now anyway.
By late afternoon I head home. Most days that means slogging up the hill to the Honoka‘a-Waipi‘o road and hitchhiking it. I carry my machete to and from. Not like there’s much of a danger out here. Small slow days with small slow people on the road. If anything I’m the dangerous one.
The first few days when I come home, there’s Mom at the door, seeing me in my mud-streaked clothes and nothing in my hands. No check or cash or pluses for the bank account. And she does that one sigh I used to think was reserved for Dean and Dean alone, another behavioral report or study-hall requirement, right? Only now it’s her daughter, another moneyless day in the fields, so a long slow exhale from her nose. It seems to blow around the entire house and fill all the space between our sentences. But eventually I bring home the first weekly exchange. Two backpacks and a rice sack of rainbow leftovers, lettuce tomatoes kalo papaya. I thump each one softly onto the table when I take it out. So she can hear the weight. So she can hear the reality. It sounds like an answer, even if I hate it.
33
DEAN, 2009
County Correctional Facility, Oregon
When there was that last phone call with Noa and he asked me what he was I never thought about asking the same question about myself. Now I know the answer: what I am, is good at being the bad guy. Funny all this time it took me to figure ’um out, but when you look back at everything from the start, shouldn’t be no surprise.
It’s like this: People in here need things and I know how for get people what they need. There’s plenty guys in here that’s down for whatever. I got some clout now, so I spread the word and my new friends do what they gotta—threaten and flex, bribe, play boy-toy games, I don’t care—to get Crazy Eights off my back and keep ’um off my back. I give my people their cut. So I got my friends and Justice-guys outside these walls getting stuff to Trujillo and whoever’s with him, bringing it inside to me. Like I’m Amazon dot com or something. I still get heat from Eights sometimes but the more our agreement works for Trujillo the less I gotta worry. There’s a new normal and that new normal is two hookups, Eights with their people and me with everyone else.
Sharks in the Time of Saviours Page 26
