by Ursula Pflug
What if he kills me?
Yet even still she missed her father a little.
Jim gave her enough pleasure to match the pain, an equal and opposite force, until she was filled. Then the pleasure ousted the pain. You have to be filled with something. It’s one or the other. Nature abhors a vacuum.
They collected avocados on a rainy day. Jim climbing high up into the tree and shaking the limbs, and Tanya standing underneath to catch them so that they fell, one after another, plump and somehow obscene, green and huge, fleshy and woman-shaped, into her hands.
The sky came down and settled on her shoulders and she cried. They went back through the forest to their camp.
Jim asked what was wrong. “Hey babe, you haven’t missed your period, have you?”
She almost punched him. Anyway, it wasn’t logical. They’d just met. And she never hid her birth control from him. She didn’t point any of this out.
She looked at Jim’s hands, so much larger than her own, large and strong and hairy and yet oddly gentle and she thought, they are like my father’s hands.
She didn’t tell him. It seemed like a terrible thing to tell him as if it was some awful secret, and he would be mortally offended, and he rolled another joint and then she couldn’t talk anymore even though it sat in her throat like a fat white dove struggling to break free: your hands are like my father’s.
And they were. She’d always dated young men before, barely out of high school. Jim was in his late twenties and had sailed from Tahiti with his friends, who, he always assured her, they would go meet soon. He had a sailor’s hands, rough and knotted as, well, knotted ropes.
She cried. It was obvious to think of the waterfalls, pooling in pools and then hurrying in streams to rattle down cliffs and eventually empty into the sea but she thought of it anyway.
“After we’ve finished patching the boat we have to go,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“B.C. The Queen Charlottes maybe. You’ll love it. You’ll learn how to sail well enough to crew anywhere.” Maybe there didn’t have to be an ending. But she liked the way he left it open-ended, too. After you spend this time with me, you’ll be able to go anywhere, for free.
“Your friends won’t like me,” she said, knowing perfectly well what she meant was: I won’t like your friends.
At last her father’s voice when it came was an exception, rarely interjecting. It was a place he couldn’t easily come, a place she was inviolate. For she’d always belonged to him; he was always in her head, telling her she just that. That was Jim’s gift to her: to almost silence her father’s voice so that she felt for the first time in her life free of him, and could be herself instead. Whatever herself was. A friend of Mouse.
Jim poked the fire with a stick. He took her face in his hands and kissed her, apologizing for his lack of tact, her tears that had prompted him to ask the one question his own fear had demanded of him. He read his book, Mark Twain or Tom Robbins or someone; he rolled another joint, he tried to make love to her. Finally he went for a walk up the valley by himself to get oranges, Valencias, he said, that legend had it some Mexican paniolo had planted at the turn of the century. Or was it Spanish? She loved those stories everyone was always telling in Hawai’i, about history, even if only half of them were true.
She realized her father was always there with them, just as the Mouse was. And what her father said was this: he isn’t good enough for you. And, astonishingly, this was just what her father had told her, when, in spite of everything, she’d begun dating, the year before both she and her mother had left, setting off in opposite directions. Two years ago precisely. Her mother was living in the Peg.
Tanya herself had drifted around Canada and then come here. Someone had told her the living was easy, but more importantly, it was geographically as far a distance from her father as it was possible to get. She kept hearing him say it, over and over and over again, a hoarse yet insistent whisper, so that finally she got up and followed Jim up the pig trail to the orange tree. At last she motioned him down and climbed the tree herself, thinking this effort would silence her father’s voice; and, throwing oranges like little suns down into Jim’s waiting hands, big as baseball gloves, she wondered, what can my father possibly mean, what can be better than this? And then she wondered again whether Jim might kill her. They were camped in such a remote spot no one would ever know. Perhaps that was what her father meant. Over roast breadfruit she forgot her irrational fear. Mouse helped feed the fire, and she lay on her back, staring at the stars peeping out between the gaps in the canopy. Nothing of this would be possible without Mouse along. Mouse washed the dishes, he sewed, repaired her jeans she tore tree climbing. The next morning after her swim, she sat at the edge of the stream, watching her reflection in the clear water, her image streaming away, carried by the currents and eddies like the many tiny yellow leaves. She sat with no clothes on, just the piece of blue cloth wrapped around her hips, while her shirt she tore climbing a food tree was being mended. While she was being mended.
“My mother wants me to go Winnipeg and live with her, you know. Finish high school and so on.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Do you want to?” Jim asked.
“Want what?”
“To live with your mom.”
“No. But I feel sorry for her all the same.”
Jim didn’t pry, said only, “Don’t let your compassion get in the way of your wisdom.”
She looked down at her body. It was very brown, graceful, very young. She looked at it in a kind of fascination, as though she couldn’t believe something so beautiful could be hers. She wore their only towel, the blue one, as a sarong. She remembered how she found it in the bushes at Seven Pools, gave it to Lulu to take back to the laundromat in Pa’ia when they got back. She and Jim made love on it that night they met, spreading it on the ground over the prickly layer of ironwood needles, soft as a bed, everything fine except for the palmetto bugs, huge tropical cockroaches scurrying over and sometimes into her sleeping bags; hence the big towel only. She hated the cockroaches, although in the forest they seemed almost benign, living in a relationship less parasitical to humans; no longer an indicator of their own failures: to be clean, to keep their lives in order, to hope for the future. In Hawai’i they were just beetles.
On the hike back down towards Hana she quailed from the sudden heat. They were unsure of the streams because of pack horses using the main trail sometimes. Jim gathered liliko’i, a type of passion fruit. They were perfectly spherical, their bright yellow skins the consistency of plastic. She’d always found them disgusting, their insides, while sweet, were also almost impossibly acidic, and resembled in appearance and texture, tapioca. That day she ate seven.
sss
Later, hitchhiking up the ranch side of the mountain again, after the scene at the courthouse, the landscape itself seemed buttoned by the same buttons that closed her soul, made it seem foreign even to herself. Except for the blooming jacarandas. How could anything be that purple?
“When will he kill me?” she remembered thinking. After he was gone it seemed funny. Yet those thoughts had occupied a space in her, space that had left no room for him after a time. Now, having thought them so often, they fluttered away, little bats. Too bad it was too late.
As before, Tanya was alone. Her natural state. Except they hadn’t left yet. She could still go find him, agree to sail to Vancouver, whether his friends proved irksome or not. She ought to turn back. It was ridiculous to hike through the crater again so soon, and alone, although that wasn’t the part that scared Tanya. What if he sailed away before she got back? She crossed the highway, faced the opposite direction.
She stuck out her thumb as the first car appeared. In her mind’s eye Jim was wearing the red paisley shirt she didn’t have the money to buy him, the one in the windo
w of the store in Lahaina, so expensive it was frequented by visiting rock stars. He wouldn’t have killed her, she thought. It would be as impossible for him to hurt her, as it would be for Mouse to do so.
After their camping trip, Jim went to visit his sailor friends at the dry dock up island. Again, he invited her to come meet them, but Lulu was at Baldwin Park, and so Tanya hung around there for a few days. Already Lulu felt like an old dear friend. A sober young American woman, twenty-one years old, her buddy. The one she would turn to if she was in trouble. The one she talked to about what was really going on. Sometimes the irony of it struck her; for a best friend she had a woman she’d known three months to talk about a lover she’d had ten days. It heightened her sense of strength, and also fragility. There was no one in her present life who knew her from the previous years, years in which she had been known always by the same others: her parents, her siblings. Her old friends too: if they hadn’t known her for years, they’d known someone who’d known her for years.
“We are a composite picture which is passed on to and entered into by any new person we meet, who may change the image but only in infinitesimal ways,” she’d told Jim under the waterfall. He’d smiled. Anyway, here all of that broke off with a snap. And she didn’t know herself anymore, who she was. She could say anything, and no one would think it out of character. She was Kaolani, from Kaua’i.
“Don’t think you know me,” Jim had said, an edge to his voice, after he’d finished smiling. The only time there had ever been even the slightest edge. I wonder when he’ll kill me, Tanya had thought in reply.
Try and kill me was better. It wasn’t as if she didn’t intend to fight back.
There was no one like Lulu for doing her laundry. It was Tanya who didn’t mind still wearing her grubby camping clothes even after her return. At last Lulu lent her a clean dress and took Tanya’s as well as her own; they caught a ride from the park into Pa’ia. Tanya left her friend in the laundromat. Instead of helping she looked for Mei’s restaurant, hoping to find Jim. She didn’t find it; maybe it was in Lahaina that day. She went and sat on the courthouse steps and cried. Jim walked by then and looked at her, as though she was someone he didn’t know very well, and finally, after some hesitation, came and sat down beside her on the stone steps. He put his hand over hers, tentatively, almost shyly, as if their hands didn’t know each other so well.
“I wish I could help you,” he said. “What is wrong?”
She could only shake her head mutely: no no no, no no no. I cannot speak it; it cannot be spoken.
My father my father my father. And even if she had spoken what would she have said? It is he who has cut out my tongue.
“I’m hungry,” Jim said. “Let’s go eat, and then we can talk.”
“I’m hungry too.” But she started to cry again, and pushed Jim away, physically too, until at last he got up and walked away.
She assumed he’d gone to his friends again and the next day hitchhiked up the mountain alone, then changed her mind and turned back. Two days later in the rich kids’ Lahaina bar with Lulu he appeared. “I have a house for us,” he said, and even though the bouncer was trying to kick him out for some reason Tanya didn’t understand, Lulu had smiled encouragingly and so Tanya had gone to Michael’s house with him.
Tanya and Jim couldn’t make it together in town life, were both too conscious of being with someone weird, an outsider to the human flock. You need at least one who swims with the school, who has the right protective colouring, Tanya thought later. They were both from the UFO, problem was. It all fell apart after the party; they’d slept together in Michael’s spare room. She’d thought they’d make love but they hadn’t, and it had been her turn to ask what was wrong.
“I have something I have to tell you.”
Her heart had begun hammering, for no reason at all.
She didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell her. At some point, they found itchy uncomfortable sleep. Just before she drifted off, Tanya thought, there’s no stitching it back together.
The day after she was back on the courthouse steps, crying again. It had shown promise, she had to admit. Lulu had come to the party too, and slept on the couch. They’d all almost felt like a family. That night Tanya had even changed her name back to Tanya from Kaolani, because Michael’s lady really was Hawai’ian and it seemed dumb.
No matter how long she sat on the stairs crying no one passed by: not Lulu, not Jim, not even Michael or Plumeria, which wasn’t Michael’s girl’s real name either, but it suited her long black hair.
She hitchhiked back to Baldwin Park alone, before dark. She didn’t mind hitchhiking alone, but not at night.
At her old campsite under the ironwood trees she found a little note, again with the same drawing of a mouse. “I’m sorry you’re sad, little sister. I wish I could help you but I don’t know how.”
Had he seen her crying on the courthouse stairs again, and, feeling helpless, not spoken to her this time? What else could the note mean? Or had it been here since before they’d moved into Michael’s? Tanya didn’t know.
After you spend this time with me, you’ll be able to go anywhere, for free.
She was barking up the wrong ironwood tree. Maybe there was still time.
sss
Three days later they were drinking coffee and eating almond cookies in the back room of the Chinese restaurant in Pa’ia. Lulu paid. Tanya was out of money and thinking of applying for food stamps. Most of the restaurants took them. She needed very little; the food stamps would feel like wealth.
“Do you know where that dry dock is? I know he told me the name but I can’t remember. No one I’ve asked knows. It’s not the kind of thing people like us know. I should ask Michael, or Kai.” Kai was her pakalolo connection; he lived in Makawao, where a lot of Hawai’ians lived.
Lulu didn’t hear. Passed her the front page of the Honolulu paper. “Isn’t that him?”
There was a full-page photograph of a man diving off a pier. To one side, she saw ‘Iao needle. She remembered they’d thought of going there; no one hiked on mysterious ‘Iao. They’d be cooler than everyone else.
But it was him.
Tanya passed the paper back. “You read it,” she said. “I can’t. What’s it say?”
“They stole a fancy sailboat on Midway. They killed the owners, probably. They caught his friends, but he got away. The Ala Wai in Honolulu was the boat’s home marina. What were his friends like?”
“I never met them. I never even saw the boat. He invited me, but after we went camping, I hung out with you instead of going with him. Remember?”
Lulu narrowed her eyes for a moment, and then kept reading.
“It was an unusual looking boat, kind of like a little galleon, wooden hulled, double masted. I guess they thought if they did their repairs here, the boat wouldn’t be recognized. But as it happens, a friend of the owners had the same idea. Take their boat out of the water at the little dry dock, ‘Iao side, way cheaper than O’ahu. No radio contact since Midway, six weeks ago. No SOS, nothing. Too fishy, so the guy called the cops before even going on deck to see what was up.”
“He told me he sailed from Tahiti with friends. He said his friends were working on the boat and he had to go help them. But, until we came back from camping, he kept putting it off.”
“To be with you.”
“He did go for a few days to help after we got back from the crater, but then he came back and we moved into Michael’s house for a few days. Remember?” She didn’t mention the scene at the courthouse in Lahaina.
Lulu nodded. “The party was nice. It felt like we were a family. I’ve hardly ever felt that, and I’ve been travelling for years.”
“If he’d helped them full-time they might’ve been done before now.”
Lulu folded the paper shut, glanced around the restaurant, lowered her voice. “Let’s finish th
is conversation somewhere else.”
On the beach Lulu said, “Imagine getting away from cops by diving off a dock and swimming.” She laughed a little. “Who else could pull that off?”
“Everyone knows what he looks like now,” Tanya said.
“He’s at large. He might come looking for you. What will you do if he does?”
“It won’t work. Even if he goes to the airport he’ll be recognized now. He can’t go to Mei’s, anywhere.”
“You don’t know Mei. She’s slippery. You could ask her.”
“No. It’s the same. Everyone saw us together. They all know I was with him. I have to leave.”
“Why not wait and see if he makes contact?”
“No.” Tanya took the folded up piece of paper out of her pocket, unfolded it, showed it to Lulu. “The mouse is back on the page. I knew the moment I saw it, everything was over.”
She and Lulu lay low at Baldwin Park, expecting the police to appear at any moment. But they didn’t. Probably because, two days later, Jim was apprehended, boarding a boat in Lahaina, as the owners prepared to leave for San Francisco. Offering to crew for nothing.
Just as Tanya had thought, everyone in the restaurant stared and whispered. Mei gave them a corner table, said softly, “They were watching. They knew he was a sailor, could crew for other people. That it would be how he’d try to avoid airports.”
She offered no judgement either way. Tanya was grateful, ate enormous almond cookies and sipped green tea. When they tried to pay Mei waved their money away. “The police won’t bother you now. Also, you don’t know. See how the trial goes. They say they didn’t kill the owners, that they found the boat abandoned on Midway, the dinghy overturned on the beach.”
“It doesn’t make sense. They should’ve radioed the harbour master in Honolulu. The boat’s papers would’ve said the owner’s names, their home marina.”
Mei nodded. “They said they were too afraid. Their own boat was damaged; they barely made it from Tahiti. They were afraid to tell anyone, wanted to get here first.”
