Paradise Park

by Allegra Goodman

  In the beach park Kekui’s parents sat in chairs in the shade of the ironwood trees that grew there. So when you approached them you walked up from the ocean onto this thick carpet of green pine needles—and the occasional tiny prickly pinecone that stabbed your bare feet. I was yelping, “Ouch!” when Kekui brought me up to his parents. But they did not smile.

  “This is my mother,” Kekui said to me. “This is my father.”

  His mom and dad looked at me, but they didn’t stir. His mom wore a palaka muumuu, which meant it was checkered. It was covered all over with little plaid squares in red and white. Kekui’s dad wore a white shirt with white embroidery, the kind imported from the Philippines. And they were big people, really big people, and they sat on their chairs with regal faces, unsmiling. They had some incredible gravity about them.

  And I said, “Hi, I’m Sharon,” and Kekui’s parents didn’t answer. I turned to Kekui’s mother and I smiled at her, a little bit anxiously. I said, “What’s your name?”

  And his mother looked at me and said, “My name is Mrs. Eldridge.”

  I felt like I’d done something wrong, but I didn’t know what.

  However, Kekui just led me to the picnic tables to meet his aunties as if everything was fine. Then he took his surfboard, and his brothers took theirs, and they went back down to the ocean and paddled out on their boards, and left me far behind, which I thought was rude, since his aunties and I had already run out of things to say to each other! I ended up going swimming, but without a board, and without anyone to help me. The waves were taller than me, and I’m five foot seven. They were colossal. When you got up close, they rose up in front of you, massive thundering walls about to fall. If you didn’t duck and swim under them, or turn and learn to ride them, the waves would crash down on your head and jerk you underwater, head over heels in spiraling somersaults, and you would open your eyes and see the sand swirling around you in the aquamarine until at last the wave would cough you up on shore and leave you in a heap. I tried and tried riding those waves, yet every time they rode me; they trampled me down to the ground. They filled my bikini bottom with sand, and I kept losing my top until I tied it on with double knots.

  When the sun set there was more music, and there was a dessert, cool to your tongue, and tall in your mouth—coconut cake topped with this creamy coconut gel with arrowroot in it, and iced with coconut icing and then sprinkled with coconut flakes—haupia cake, which is what I would define as angel food, since this is probably the stuff that real angels eat. The band of relatives stopped playing. Just one aunt sang and one uncle kept time, slapping a gourd. Then Mrs. Eldridge and two of Kekui’s aunties stood up, and everyone hushed. They stood up and danced a hula, these big ladies, who when they moved had this suppleness—this enormous grace, slowly turning and dancing with their hips and feet and hands. And that was the first hula I ever saw—I mean the first real hula outside of the Saturday-afternoon shows in Waikiki, where an emcee took you on a journey through the Pacific Islands from the plastic raffia skirts of Tahiti all the way to the Saran-wrapped white poi balls on braided black and red yarn that the Maori girls were supposed to swing. After the hula there was a bonfire. You couldn’t see the green cliffs anymore above you, only the white foam rushing from the sea.

  The party broke up when it was almost dawn, and Kekui took me home. “How come you abandoned me all day to your relatives?” I complained, but then I put my arms around him, because I’d missed him, and I put my hands under his shirt.

  So I turned out to be the impatient one. I remember the first touch of his hands. He touched the tan lines where my bathing suit had been, and he whispered, “You’re so white! You’re so white.”

  WE were best friends. We went hiking out in the Hawaiian Homelands, where Kekui’s tutu, who was his grandma, lived. It was so wet out there, water was always trickling, and a lot of times there was so much mud you took off your sandals so you could get a better grip on the trail with your toes. When we went hiking, the plants and trees were always tangled up, and there would be fruit hanging behind the leaves—guavas, and lilikoi, which were passion fruit and grew on vines. Later on I found out the fruit got their name from these little red spots inside that were like the wounds of Jesus in his passion. Back then, though, I thought calling lilikoi “passion fruit” was odd, since the actual fruit were so hard and tart. I mean, you’d think passion fruit would be soft and wet, and easy on your tongue. But that was just me.

  Mainly we used to pick guavas for Tutu, so she could make guava jam, which the church sold at Christmastime to raise money. We did another thing too. We caught cockroaches, big flying ones that lived out there in the jungle, and we would bring them back alive to town. Kekui had a high school friend who worked in a not very upscale bar, and he had a special box he’d built like a miniature track with dividers for lanes, and a clear plastic cover with ventilation holes, and he’d race those roaches. Guys would come in and place bets on which roach would win. My conscience I think told me a few times that cockroach racing was not a respectful way to treat members of a species that had been here on earth so much longer than humankind, but at that time of my life my conscience didn’t speak very loudly. Being twenty-three was so loud it drowned out the conscientious voices in my head.

  The problem was, Kekui’s parents didn’t like me, and actually none of his family did. This was for a few reasons. One was that I didn’t share their religion. Another was that they still thought he should marry his old girlfriend, Janelle, and take care of his child. And finally, they didn’t approve of me because I was a Mainland haole—white—which, no matter how you looked at me, you just couldn’t get around. After a while Kekui’s family started feeling like I wasn’t going away by myself, and they started worrying about my intentions, even though I didn’t have very many. In any case, Kekui’s mom, Mrs. Eldridge, refused to let me see Kekui in her home, and she and Mr. Eldridge told Kekui they didn’t want me coming to the family get-togethers as if I was part of the family, because I wasn’t. And they said they’d raised him to be a good Christian man and to be responsible, and what about Janelle? What about Luke? Luke was the name of Kekui’s baby.

  While Kekui’s family was giving him grief, one of the cooks at Zippy’s told him about a sideline he had as a supplier for a place down near the airport that did gold electroplating. This was in the days when gold electroplated jewelry was huge. You would take a leaf, for example, a nice green little marijuana leaf, and you would electroplate it so it was now a nice shiny gold little marijuana leaf suitable for wearing on a gold chain around your neck. Well, the latest thing was electroplating cockroaches—not the big fliers Kekui and I caught for racing, but daintier, under an inch. People loved gold cockroaches. You could get them on stickpins, sort of a roach broach, or you could just buy them as collectibles, big as life, just as detailed, and better than any model cockroach could be because you’d have the genuine article there encased in fourteen-karat gold. Those insects were in such demand, Kekui and I could get a finder’s fee for collecting them. So we started supplying this place on Middle Street with small-to medium-sized roaches. We brought the creatures to their doom.

  Probably the most grisly part was that the roaches had to be alive for the electroplating. If they had died a natural death, they would have rolled over onto their backs and lain on the ground with their legs waving in the air, and then when the end came, they would have folded their legs peacefully to them, like Medieval Christians on top of tombs. But what the public wanted was gold roaches that looked alive, and ready to crawl right up your arm, so the bugs had to be up and breathing when they got zapped and turned to gold, caught in the moment, just like the people of Pompeii. The guys on Middle Street had a refrigerator in the back, and they kept ether in there, which I’m not sure exactly how they got, since it’s a restricted substance, but I guess they claimed they were scientists. They had ether in glass flasks, nice woozy stuff, and they used to administer the ether to the roaches Kekui and
I brought in. Very carefully they dosed each cockroach with an eyedropper. Just one to two drops on a cotton ball per insect, just enough so they held still for the procedure. If you gave a roach too much ether, then he or she might overdose. If the poor thing OD’d, then the roach would spread his wings like a little angel, and that wouldn’t look lifelike at all. So the guys dosed all our roaches just enough to put them out while they were still standing on their own six feet. And then they went ahead and immersed the victims in a saltwater bath with the gold in solution and zapped these electrical charges, from cathode to anode and back again, and every little particle of gold migrated to the submerged body of the bug, so the cockroaches turned to gold.

  Kekui and I started collecting about once a week. Mondays we’d take the swing shift at Zippy’s from early morning to three o’clock, and then we’d borrow Kekui’s brother’s car and drive out to the Kailua dump and basically go prospecting there in the mounds of garbage and broken-down appliances. We’d catch young roaches, ten, twenty at a time, just by looking under old stoves rusting out, or picking through the kitchen waste sitting there and putrefying. We hardly ever ran into anybody there at the dump, or if we did, we kept to ourselves and just left with our catch, which we took home in old clean mayonnaise jars with the lids screwed on tight and punched with just a few tiny pinholes for ventilation.

  Then one week we came up against a couple of local guys harvesting auto parts. I was collecting in an old wreck and I’d found a beauty right in the front seat of the car, antennae just poking out from the ripped upholstery. Boom! The whole car starts rolling and pitching. I see these two guys prying open the hood and pulling out the engine and transmission, right from under me. In a flash my roach was gone. “Hey!” I screamed. They couldn’t have had any trouble hearing me since the car had no windows or doors.

  They just kept on working at that engine.

  “Hey!” I jumped out of the wreck and ran around the hood to face these guys. “What do you think you’re doing!”

  “Eh, bodder you?” one of these guys jeered at me. He was probably just a kid, but he was bigger than I was.

  “Yeah, it bothers me!” I hollered right back at him.

  Then the other guy pushed me so hard he knocked the wind out of me. I heard Kekui calling, “Sharon! You all right?” And I couldn’t even answer, but already he was running over, and he was carrying a pipe he’d dragged from somewhere, and he flew at the first guy and the second one, both of them at once. It was the most chivalrous thing anyone had ever done for me. I was really touched, in addition to being scared shitless. But it was two against one, and not a kung fu movie, so Kekui got beaten and cut and scraped, and his nose broken, before we managed to run out to his brother’s car and I could get it started, my hands all shaking, and these two bullies pounding on the doors and windows and basically hounding us out of the dump and promising they’d kill us if we ever came back.

  Kekui’s whole family was up in arms about this. His mother was beside herself, which you could understand. But the unbelievable thing was she and Kekui’s father both blamed me for the whole incident! They didn’t care that I was the one who took Kekui to the emergency room and made sure he got stitched up and had his tetanus shot. They didn’t care about that at all. Instead they blamed me for being the cause of the fight and getting their son into danger, since presumably if I hadn’t shown my haole face and provoked these people none of this would have happened. And they told Kekui that having a haole girlfriend was going to get him beat up more and more, and having a girlfriend who wasn’t Christian was going against his faith, not to mention I was wild and setting him a bad example.

  I wasn’t there at Kekui’s house to hear all of this, but Kekui told me about it. How his parents were going to disown him if he kept seeing me, and kick him out so he’d have nowhere to go. Kekui and I were sitting together at the Find-a-Pearl stand when he told me this. The customers kept coming by, and Kekui kept slitting open those poor oysters. In between times we asked each other what we should do, and sat looking into the oyster barrel with downcast eyes, like we were the original star-crossed lovers. Suddenly I shook myself. “Oh, for Godssakes,” I said. I mean, did we think we were living in the Middle Ages? Romeo and Juliet had been obsolete for years.

  “What?” Kekui asked me.

  “If your mom and dad don’t like me, then tough. And if they feel like kicking you out, then go.”

  “Go where?” he asked.

  Then I got inspired. “We’ll get out of here, and go to Molokai,” I said, “to that government land, and we’ll live out there in the forest with your sister.”

  Kekui grinned at me.

  “What do they farm out there, anyway?” I asked.

  And he said, “You never figured that out?”

  5

  Eden

  THE government-land jungle out on Molokai was the most ruthless place I’d ever been. Philodendrons choked the trees. Vines strangled the philodendrons. Every plant put out its leaves and tendrils like grappling hooks; its stems like stilts to catch the light. Every day those trees and ferns and roots were jostling and pushing each other to get by. And since in rain forests there isn’t any limit to how far living things will go, they just grew and grew till they were giant size. The philodendron leaves would be three, four feet across, and the ferns would grow the size of banana plants, just unfurling more and more fronds, sending up more flags. The lichens and the fungi would grow till the tree trunks were soft and leprous. And there were these vines called kauna’oa—orange parasites that had actual suction cups to suck the life’s blood out of any tree or plant they could latch on to. Lilikoi vines were so thick they grew into whole arbors. The place was festering with fruit, so you couldn’t eat it fast enough. The guavas shone like yellow eggs, and they were so sweet, so good, but you had to watch what you bit into, because these special fruit maggots used to nest in them, and you couldn’t tell from the outside, unless you turned the fruit all over in your hands. The bugs could enter through a hole small as a pinprick and leave the fruit’s skin pure and smooth, while on the inside, ten thousand swarming black maggots would be feasting and pillaging on the pink guava flesh. The insects were obscene. At night the moths thumped like bats. The roaches were the biggest fliers I’d seen. Their antennae were longer than my index finger. But they were lean, not broad like rubbish-fed city roaches, and they bit in the night. They were always hungry. There were rats, too, running and climbing in every crevice of the place, and it was nothing to them to shimmy up a tree and eat out an entire nest of fledgling birds. Then there were pigs running rampant, with tiny little eyes, and they ate everything in front of them. They’d eat the rats, and the birds and the fruit off the trees and the trees themselves, and if they got hungry enough, they’d eat their own piglets too.

  But as human life went it could be quiet there. It could be beautiful. It was very physical earthy work, farming. Kekui’s sister Lani and her boyfriend, Joseph, and I were just working that rich humus and growing pakalolo, which was marijuana. This was, of course, before the helicopter patrols. It was the golden age. Every day we got up and we tended our green plants and cleared away space for them and weeded them and personally picked off the slugs and parasites, because the whole operation was organic. We nurtured every crop by hand in a network of little patches among the trees. We were raising a secret garden.

  Lani and Joseph had an incredible place they’d fixed up where the jungle and the runoff water ran down to the sea. It was a weathered old hut with a corrugated iron roof. The glass in the window was broken when they moved in, but they stapled up fresh screening on the window frame so it was like new. Kekui and I lived farther in, meaning a little bit closer to the crops. We also had a gem, an abandoned field station—needless to say, rent free. It was only slightly termite eaten and surrounded by trees, or actually one banyan tree that was the size of a herd of elephants with its roots hanging down like tails and trunks and legs on all sides. There was a door
that closed, and hooks inside to hang your stuff, and a great table Kekui scavenged. It was a giant spool that the telephone company had used once upon a time to reel out cable. When you set it on end, it turned into a round table. Around harvest time our distributor would come out and he’d bring us stuff—money, kerosene, batteries. But it was amazing how the so-called necessities of life turned out to be so forgettable. Like newspapers, or plumbing, or cars. None of that mattered. And that’s what I loved. We had mountain apples, which were these small fruits just blushing red, and you bit them and they were completely delicate with the slightest crunch, just sweet enough. We had waterfalls with clear sweet water running down the forest slopes into a little stream, and we had fish in there, gray tilapia we used to fry up on our smoky little hibachi and eat right in their curling skins. And of course we had the fruits of our labors, the best homegrown pakalolo there was, so in the evenings or the afternoons, or anytime at all, you could roll your own, and sit back and blow some rings.

  On the one hand it was a very simple life, and not a lot of thinking or wrestling with questions in your mind, but putting your mind to rest, and letting the days just carry you. On the other hand, farming was a huge effort, cutting off other plants that every day tried to move in and strangle your crops. You had to be vigilant about the rats eating your supplies. And it wasn’t like at any point you could let up, because there was no winter to hunker down and hibernate, mend the nets and oil the traps. But there were patches of pure pleasure, just sitting around, or swimming in the stream when it was swollen up after some rain, or just enjoying the absence of society, ditching all those clothes and rules that went on out there. I was at a time of my life when I was not into clothes very much, and when I was alone, or just working with Kekui, I ended up being naked, just feeling that warm air with my skin, just opening up all my pores. My hair had grown long again, and I liked to feel it hanging down against my bare back, because it was so soft and heavy. I liked to swish it all around me.