The Cursed Canoe

by Frankie Bow

  “Kathy seemed like a very forceful person,” Pat said. “Always convinced that she was right.” He glanced at me. “I think she got people’s backs up.”

  “She could be a little rough around the edges,” Sherry placed her hand on Glenn's evenly tanned bicep. “I wonder if she attracted some bad energy. Glenn’s crystallologist told him if someone sends you too much negative energy, you could get hurt. Maybe even die.”

  “Oh yeah,” he agreed. “That’s totally true. Most people don’t realize how powerful the chi is. Negative energy is literally deadly.”

  “I owe you a hundred dollars,” Pat murmured.

  “How does that work? Has negative energy ever actually killed someone?” I could hear the contempt in Emma's voice, although I don’t think Glenn caught it.

  “Totally! There’s this thing called Voodoo death? Where if you hate someone enough, and totally want them dead? They die. It’s proven. The only problem is, it comes back and hurts you too. It’s totally toxic. Hating someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

  “Voodoo death,” Emma repeated, with a caustic edge to her voice. Emma, who is an accomplished biologist, has no patience whatsoever with anything she deems pseudoscience (a category that in her mind includes not only crystallology but also sociology, psychology, economics, and management).

  “Yeah, Voodoo Death,” Glenn repeated. “It’s seriously real. You can look it up.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE LIBRARY’S INTERIOR featured a terrazzo floor and faux-walnut and chrome tables that had been around so long, they had gone out of fashion and come back in. My plan was to read up on “Voodoo Death” without logging into our library database and leaving an electronic trail. I hadn’t mentioned any of this to Emma or Pat. Instead, I had made the case that spending Saturday morning in an air-conditioned library would be a great opportunity for all three of us to catch up on grading, class prep, and writing. Someone said being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life. That’s also a pretty good description of what it’s like to be a college professor.

  I recognized the young man who hurried up to greet us as one of my former students.

  “E komo mai, Professor Barda.” He smiled. “Welcome to our information literacy resource center.”

  “Oh, hi...” I glanced down at his ID card, “Micah. It’s nice to see you again. I thought you graduated?”

  “Did. Job market on the island kinda junk, but.”

  “No kidding,” Pat said.

  “But they was hiring here,” Micah said. “I was lucky to get one job. Anyways, may I help you to find anything in particular today?”

  “We reserved study room C,” I said. “We might need someone to unlock it for us.”

  “I can do that,” he announced happily. “Follow me.”

  “So what is your job here, Micah?” I asked as he led us toward the back of the library, the hard floor ringing with our footsteps. “What do you do?”

  “Knowledge Curator. Means I could help you look stuff up. I know you don’t need any help, but, Professor. Choke guys, I mean a lot of us working here.” He gestured around the library, and sure enough, it was teeming with young people shelving books, straightening chairs, and wiping down desks. Micah led us to a door, unlocked it, let us into the windowless, beige-walled study room and left us to it. As soon as Micah had left, I went out to the stacks and retrieved several dusty volumes of bound journals.

  The three of us worked quietly for a few minutes. Emma tapped away on her laptop while Pat graded papers.

  Emma looked up. “What are you doing, Molly?”

  I was perusing a journal whose focus was mental health, religion, and culture. “Looking up some information for my class. On belief systems around the world.”

  Many of which, I did not add, believed in something called “Voodoo death.” People who had broken taboos, or who believed they had been cursed or put under a spell, often seemed to give up and die.

  “The mechanisms for this phenomenon,” the article stated dryly, “which we term psychogenic death, remain controversial.”

  The authors were maddeningly vague about whether psychogenic death could be inflicted on an unaware victim such as Kathy Banks. At least I assumed she was unaware. Kathy had never struck me as someone who was particularly sensitive to other peoples’ feelings.

  “Speaking of Kathy Banks. I never told you guys the latest about that student in Larry Schneider’s class.”

  “Were we speaking of Kathy Banks?” Emma glared at me. “I thought I was trying to get some work done.”

  “Oh, Phone Boy?” Pat leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Did you ever figure out whether the letter he left in your guys’ mailboxes was supposed to be a death threat or a suicide note?”

  “No. Either way, though, not good. So I filled out the paperwork to have him removed from Larry’s class. Instead of signing off on it, Kathy Banks called me into her office. Want to guess what happened?”

  “She congratulated you for preventing a classroom massacre,” Pat said, “and told you that the student would be referred to psychiatric services immediately.”

  “Ha! No. She lectured me about how I had failed our university’s mission to serve every student. She accused me of imposing my value system on him.”

  “Are you sure you want to talk about this?” Pat asked.

  “Obviously, she does.” Emma doesn’t like interruptions, and I could tell I’d made her a little grumpy.

  “Our safety, our students’ safety, meant nothing to her. It was all about, I don’t even know. Implementing the Student Retention Office’s feel-good initiative du jour. checking off the right box on some grant renewal form.”

  “Maybe you need to check your privilege,” Pat said. “Maybe she was right. You and Larry assumed his note was threatening, but it sounds like you might be imposing your cultural—”

  “How about you give your White Savior complex a rest, Pat. He’s the orthopedist’s kid.”

  Pat raised his hands in surrender and went back to his grading.

  “Well, Kathy’s dead now,” Emma said. “So you can be happy.”

  “I’m not happy she’s dead.” I stood and stacked the volumes on the table. “I don’t think I can use these.”

  “Just leave them on the table,” Emma said. “They’ll reshelve it.”

  “That’s okay.” I hoisted up the entire stack of books and did a sort of controlled stagger toward the door. “I’ve been sitting too long. I’ll put them back where I found them. It’ll be like I was never even here.”

  "Want to take a break and get some coffee?" Emma asked.

  "Thanks, Emma, but I just remembered I have some errands to run. I'll see you guys Sunday at the Pair-O-Dice."

  I didn’t feel like spending any more time with Emma or Pat. I wanted to talk to Donnie.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WATER DROPS QUIVERED on the hood of my 1959 Thunderbird as I drove out of the Wiki-Wash. The two-tone turquoise and white paint job gleamed in the afternoon sun. This was one of those times I was glad I’d had my car shipped over to Hawaii.

  The times when I’m less glad usually involve my mechanic, Earl Miyashiro of Miyashiro Motors. Earl keeps telling me I should give up on my temperamental Squarebird and buy something more reliable. Maybe my car does handle like a leaky boat with a broken rudder, and a two-year-old Toyota wouldn’t rack up repair bills that rivaled my student loan payments. But there’s no car built today that can make my heart sing, and I don’t care what kind of funny looks Earl gives me when I say things like that. I would go to someone less judgmental and literal-minded, but Earl is the only auto mechanic on the island who will go near my car.

  My sparkling T-bird and I headed over to Donnie’s Drive-Inn for a late takeout lunch. Merrie Musubis, the Drive-Inn’s biggest competitor, has better-tasting food, no question. But Donnie’s Drive-Inn has Donnie Gonsalves.

  Donnie spotted
me at the takeout window and came over just as the server was handing me a big Styrofoam bowl brimming with my Sumo Saimin.

  “No knee da kava?” The young woman asked me.

  As I was trying to parse her question, Donnie intervened.

  “Did you need a cover for your bowl, Molly?” he translated.

  “Oh. No. No, thank you. I was going to eat here.”

  Donnie called back into the kitchen that he was taking five minutes, and led me to a clean picnic table. Cleanliness is the one outstanding feature of Donnie’s Drive-Inn. The seating is all outdoors and the food is nothing special, but every surface is spotless. The floor, the tables, the restrooms, the service windows. Immaculate.

  “Molly, this is a nice surprise.” Donnie slid onto the bench opposite me. Even toward the end of the lunchtime rush, he looked cool and unruffled. His black hair, graying slightly at the top and sides, was trimmed short and perfectly in place. His red Donnie’s Drive-Inn polo shirt looked freshly pressed, a sharp crease down each sleeve. He had the top two buttons of his placket undone, as he always did. Never one, never three. I used to wonder why even his casual shirts always looked like someone had ironed them until I found out he sends his clothes out to be professionally laundered. Someone actually does iron them. I suppose that makes sense for someone like Donnie. He has a lot more money than free time.

  “I heard the news about Kathy Banks,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Of course, he had already heard the news about Kathy Banks. The coconut wireless is faster than any newfangled fiber-optic network. Heaven help anyone who needs to keep a secret in this town.

  I set my Sumo Saimin bowl between us to share. I’d been planning to gobble up the whole thing myself, but I didn’t want Donnie to sit there and watch me plow through a giant bowl of noodles, fish cake, and fried Spam. Besides, he hadn’t let me pay for it, so not sharing would have seemed selfish.

  “Was she the one from the office that’s always giving you trouble? Her name sounds familiar.”

  “No one’s giving me trouble, Donnie. I mean, I might have had some minor disagreements with the Student Retention Office. But I didn’t hate her or anything. You’re right, it was sudden. It’s kind of hard to believe.”

  I sighed and gazed into the golden depths of the Sumo Saimin Bowl. “In an instant, everything’s changed. She’s actually gone.”

  “That’s always hard,” he said, “when someone passes on, and you weren’t on good terms. There’s no way to make your peace.”

  “I was on good terms with her!” I insisted. “At least I wasn’t not on good terms with her.”

  Donnie smiled knowingly and turned his attention to lunch. He slid a pair of wooden chopsticks out of their paper packaging, snapped them apart, and rubbed them together to smooth the splinters.

  “Is your school going to close for a half day or anything?” he asked.

  “Oh, no. What happened to poor Kathy Banks isn’t going to slow down the machine at all. You’d think at least the Student Retention Office might take some time off to mourn her or something, but no. The Student Retention Office never sleeps. In fact, you know what? I just found out they’re inflicting a fresh atrocity on our university even as we speak.”

  He smiled, dug his chopsticks into the bowl and pulled out a knot of noodles. “Is this what you were telling me about using professors’ online ratings for hiring and firing?”

  “No, that’s already a done deal,” I said. “And we have the ratings thing under control anyway.”

  “Do they know you guys write your own reviews?”

  “I’ll tell anyone who will listen, but the SRO people just keep saying, Crowdsourcing! Crowdsourcing! As if it’s a magic spell. It seems like you don’t have to be very smart to get a job in the Student Retention Office. Anyway, the latest thing is that they’re lobbying to rid of our general history requirement. Because, you know, history is hard and boring and Today’s Millennial Digital Native doesn’t want to waste time studying all of those old dead people. The faculty are going to get together and try to fight it, but you know, by the time administration asks us for our opinion, the decision’s already been made.”

  “So your students don’t like having to take history?”

  Donnie plunged his chopsticks into the bowl. Watching the bands of his sleeves strain over his well-developed biceps made me lose my train of thought for a moment. Donnie doesn't have time to go to the gym, but he doesn't have to. He spends his day hauling around stainless steel cooking equipment and pallets of frozen food in a crowded, steamy kitchen. I could never do his job. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. After so many decades of schooling, I thought, I have remarkably few practical skills. Come the apocalypse, I’ll either have to get myself into a supervisory position, or end up as a protein source.

  “Of course they don’t like having to take history,” I said. “They don’t like having to take anything. I can think of a few who probably wish we’d mail them their degrees, and cut out all of that tedious learning stuff in between.”

  “You don’t have any students who are that bad, do you?”

  I’d had at least one who was that bad, and worse. Donnie’s beloved son Davison, as it happens.

  “Oh, no, of course not,” I said quickly. “I’m exaggerating to make a point. I have wonderful students. You know that.”

  Davison had taken, and barely passed, my IBM class (that’s Intro to Business Management). Gonsalves fils was an unrepentant cheater and a lying suckup, among other things. I had been greatly relieved when Donnie moved him to a fancy private college on the mainland.

  The way Donnie spoils his son is probably the only thing that causes real tension between us. Whenever the subject comes up, though, all Donnie has to say to win the argument is, “Wouldn’t your parents do this for you?” And he’s right; they would try to shield me from the consequences of my own actions if they could. The difference is they would have the decency to make me feel guilty about it for the rest of my life.

  In any event, I’ve come to realize honesty is not the best policy when it comes to the topic of young Davison Gonsalves. It’s easier to let Donnie believe that I adore his demon spawn every bit as much as he does.

  “Aren't the students your customers?” Donnie asked. “Why not just give your customers what they want? If my customers want their Sumo Saimin bowl without kamaboko, they can have it.” He gestured with his chopsticks at a D-shaped piece of fish cake, white edged with hot pink. “That’s kamaboko, by the way.”

  I already knew what kamaboko was.

  “It’s fish cake,” he explained.

  "The students are not our customers, Donnie. And a college education is not a bowl of noodle soup.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “YOU DON'T THINK THE student is your customer?” Donnie asked, as if such a thought had never occurred to him.

  I indicated a delivery truck in the parking lot.

  "No more than Palila Ranch thinks their cattle are their customers."

  “Interesting way to look at it,” he said. "So who is?"

  "You are."

  "I mean who's your customer."

  "You. Employers. You’re the one who’s going to hire them. You want us to send you a pack of illiterate dunderheads?”

  Donnie laughed. “I can find all the...what did you call them? Illiterate dunderheads I need on my own, thanks. Molly, this history thing sounds like it’s above your pay grade. You said they’ve already made up their minds, right? You shouldn’t stress out about it.”

  Donnie had started working right out of high school and had built Donnie’s Drive-Inn without the benefit of any formal higher education. Things like general education requirements don’t mean much to him. Even the relentless dastardliness of the Student Retention Office seems to strike him as amusing. He doesn’t see the cracks spreading in the very foundation of civilization, the way I do.

  “I watched our university lose a multimillion dollar donation,” I said.
r />   Now I had his attention.

  “You know Skip Kojima?” I asked.

  “Kojima Surfwear? Yeah. Met him a few times. He’s a good guy.”

  “One of our students told him he was such an inspiration to her that she wanted to start her own clothing line. Called Tokyo Rose.”

  Donnie raised his eyebrows.

  “And not to be hip and edgy so she could sell it in some store on Melrose or anything like that,” I added.

  “Some store where?”

  “In Hollywood,” I said. “Not really the point. The point is, she actually thought it was a good name for a brand because it sounded pretty. She said this to a man whose father fought in the four hundred forty-second.”

  “Not good,” Donnie agreed.

  “You know what else she said? She said she thought Japanese tourists would like it.”

  “Maybe your history requirement isn’t working too well to begin with.”

  “Touché,” I sighed. “Actually, the student I’m talking about was a history major. Not only that, I found out there already is a Tokyo Rose label. So if she had simply taken a few minutes to do a quick search beforehand—sorry. I didn’t mean to dominate the conversation with shop talk. You know, the history department should’ve seen this coming. The Student Retention Office told them to cut down their writing requirements and they refused. They should’ve played ball like—anyway. I’m really done now. What’s new with you?”

  “I’ve been collecting recipes, believe it or not.”

  “To sell at the Drive-Inn?” I asked. “Like a souvenir cookbook?” I wondered who would buy such a thing. Donnie’s Drive-Inn is great for a quick bowl of Sumo Saimin or a plateful of candy-sweet teriyaki beef slices, but what would be the point of reproducing the Drive-Inn’s dishes at home? All of the blandness and none of the convenience?