Sharks in the Time of Saviors - Kawai Strong Washburn Page 0,2

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They’re just dreams, I’d tell you, and you’d ask what I was talking about. I’d try to repeat some interpretation of the nightmares—the cane, the reaping of your family, the hives—but you never remembered what you’d just been telling me. It was as if you’d just woken and found yourself in front of me while I told you someone else’s story. The nightmares happened every few months, then every few weeks, then every day.

The sugarcane plantation had been around since before we were born, our whole side of the island shagged with fields of cane, mauka to makai. I’m sure since the beginning people had been talking about the Final Harvest, but it seemed like it would never come: “Hāmākua’s always hiring,” your father said, dismissing the rumors with a flap of his wrist. But then, so soon after your nightmares reached their daily cadence, along Māmane came the low of the cane-truck horns, that September afternoon in 1994, and your father was one of the drivers.

If I could be above our town, looking down, I would remember it this way: Into the town came the tractor trailers, many with the chain-link-style beds, empty loops like the ribs of neglected animals, swaying as they made their way past the Salvation Army, past the churches, past the empty storefronts that used to hawk bins of cheap plastic imports, past the high school across from the elementary school, past the football-baseball-soccer field. As the trucks passed, blowing their horns, people left the bank and grocery store and gathered in rows on the sidewalks, or the shoulders of the streets. Even those inside that didn’t come out must have heard the truck horns moaning, the air brakes bleating, the hymn of an industrial funeral. It was the sound of a new emptiness coming. Because they would never be in the fields again, the trucks were polished to a mirror-shine, none of the dirt of work on them, and for all the Filipino-Portuguese-Japanese-Chinese-Hawaiian families that lined the streets, the chrome threw back a slippery quicksilver reflection of their dark-brown faces and the new truth settling there.

We were in that crowd, me, Dean, Kaui, and you. Dean stood still and stiff like a little soldier. His hands were already so big at nine, and I remember the dry sheath of his palm wrapped around my hand. Kaui was drifting in between my legs, the breathy tickle of her hair against my thighs, a few fingers pressing after. You were at my other hand, and unlike the confusion and anger thrumming along Dean’s fingers, his stiff neck, unlike the four-year-old’s dreamy spin of apathy coming from Kaui, you seemed completely at peace.

Only now can I guess what you’d been dreaming about—whose was the death, our bodies or the sugarcane. In the end it didn’t matter. You’d seen the end coming before any of us. That was the second sign. There was a voice inside you, wasn’t there, a voice that was not yours, you were only the throat. The things it knew, and was trying to tell you—tell us—but we didn’t listen, not yet.

Just one of those things, we said.

The cane trucks made their turn just before the grocery store, ascended the steep hill out of town, and never came back.

A few months after the plantation went under, we were completely stretched. Everyone was searching; it was no different for your father. He was driving for hours across the island, chasing a paycheck that moved like obake: here and gone. Sunday morning in the orange light bouncing off our old wood floors he’d be at the kitchen counter, clutching his favorite coffee mug spreading its Kona steam and sliding his fingers over the “help wanted” section, lips moving like a chant. Days he found something, he’d slowly cut it from the page and take it with just the tips of his hands and place it in a manila folder he kept near the phone. Days he didn’t, the sound of the newspaper as he crushed it was like a flock of birds taking flight.

But that didn’t stop your father’s smile; nothing would. He’d been that way even when things were steady, even when you all were in hanabata days, upper lips crusted with baby-leak, just learning to walk, and he would fling you into the air so your hair would flap open and your eyes would squint happy and you’d squeal your brightest. He’d throw you guys as high as he could—aiming, he said, for the