Sharks in the Time of Saviors - Kawai Strong Washburn Page 0,1

but always assumed it was only a myth, part of a hymn of what had been lost to Hawai‘i, these ghosts of the long-dead ali‘i. But there they were. Marching slow on their way up the ridge, headed for the black back of the valley and whatever waited there for undead kings in all the damp and darkness. The string of torches plodded along the ridge, winking between the trees, dipping, then rising, until all at once the flames snuffed out.

A loud, creaking groan sounded out across the valley, all around us, the sound I imagined a whale would make before dying.

Whatever words your father and I had choked in our throats. We were up and off the pickup bed and jerking on our clothes, toes in gritty black sand, us hopping and gasping and yanking into the cab, ignition, and your father had the engine loud as we tore back through the valley road, the headlights flashed over rocks and mud puddles and bright green leaves; the whole time we knew those ghosts were in the air behind us, around us, if we didn’t see them we felt them. The truck bounced through the rutted wreck of the tar, the windshield showed trees and sky and back down, into the muck, up and down as we bounced, everything black and blue but what our headlights could flash over, your father making the truck race between the lurking trees and up the long road to the exit. We came up out of the bottom of the valley so fast that there was nothing below now but the few speckles of house lights farther back in the valley, the outlines of the sunken taro patches gone white in the midnight.

It wasn’t until we got to the lookout that we stopped. The cab was full of panic and mechanical effort.

Your father blew a long breath and said, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

It was the first time he’d talked about anything holy in a while. And there were no more torches; no more night marchers. We listened to our blood thump in our ears and it told us alive alive alive.

Just one of those things, is what me and your father told ourselves, soon after and for many years. After all, there were so many people in Hawai‘i that had seen similar things; we’d talk story in full kanikapila mode at a beach barbecue or back lanai house party long enough, and plenty similar stories came up.

* * *

THE NIGHT MARCHERS—you’d been conceived that night, and all through your first years there were stranger things. The way animals changed around you: suddenly subdued, they’d nuzzle you and form a circle as if you were one of their own, didn’t matter if it was a chicken or a goat or a horse, it was something instant and unbreakable. Then there were the times we’d catch you in our backyard, eating fistfuls of dirt or leaves, flowers, compulsively. Far beyond the dull curiosity of other keikis your age. And some of those plants—the orchids in hanging baskets, for example—would bloom in the most incredible colors, almost overnight.

Just one of those things, we still told ourselves.

But now I know.

* * *

DO YOU REMEMBER HONOKA‘A IN 1994, not so different than today? Māmane Street, both sides with low wood buildings from the first days of cane, front doors repainted but inside still the same old bones. The faded auto-mechanic garages, the pharmacy with the same deals always on the windows, the grocery store. Our rented house on the edge of town with its layers of stripping paint and cramped bare rooms, shower stall patched onto the back of the garage. The bedroom you shared with Dean, where you started having nightmares vague with sugarcane and death.

Those nights. You’d come quiet to the side of our bed, still partially tangled in your sheets, swaying, with your hair smeared every direction, sniffling in your breath.

Mama, you’d say, it happened again.

I’d ask what you saw, and you’d start to talk in a spill of images—black fields cracked and empty, cane stalks shooting not from soil but from the chest, arms, eyes of me or your father or your brother or all of us, then a sound like the inside of a wasp hive—and while you talked your eyes were not your own, you were not behind them. You were only seven years old, and the things that were pouring out of you. But after a minute of talking this way you’d come