House of Many Gods (3 page)

W
HEN
R
OSIE WAS THIRTEEN
, A
VA HAD ANOTHER CHILD
. T
HE FATHER
, a graceful Chinese famous for his tango, was only five years older than Rosie. Ben threw Ava out of the house; she never made it to the clinic. Her baby slid out on the backseat of Nanakuli’s only taxi while the driver knelt in the bushes vomiting.

Much later she told the girls how she bit the umbilical cord, swung the baby upside down, and slapped it till it screamed. Then she wrapped it in her skirt, climbed up to the driver’s seat, stuffed the man’s jacket between her legs, and stole his taxi. For years, Ana pictured her speeding off in a rusty Ford, her newborn yelling itself purple while she shifted gears and struggled with her afterbirth.

Ava and the tango man hid out in Honolulu’s Chinatown, living off the sale of the stripped-down cab. When they were finally arrested, Ben posted bail, Ava was put on probation and he brought her home. The baby, Taxi, was beautiful. But when Rosie bent to lift her little brother, Ava lunged at her.

“Touch him, I break your arm.”

The girl stood straight so she and her mother were eye to eye.

“Guarantee. I never again come near your little bastard.”

That word again. It was the first time Ana saw her cousin’s edge. She saw something else that day. Rosie’s walk was becoming obvious. For several
years, she had listed slightly, as if her right foot were deprived of a natural heel. Each year the lopsided walk was more pronounced. Ben took her to a foot doctor who found nothing, but an ear specialist said her equilibrium was off. Tiny bones of her inner ear were permanently damaged.

Ana thought of Rosie flying headfirst through a window. She thought of Ava striking Rosie’s head with an iron skillet swung like a baseball bat. Rosie’s flame-scarred hand that took away her lifeline. Ana crawled into bed and held her.

T
HOUGH FOLKS IN
H
ONOLULU CALLED THE
W
AI‘ANAE
C
OAST A
“junk kine” life, somewhere in her early years, Ana began to see the forbidding beauty of her land. Slowly, the distant jade mountains and red valleys gained entry to her upcast eyes. The road past her house was paved, but dust lay so thick, it had always seemed a dirt road. Some days she stood on that road, hands on hips, as if barring entry to her valley, her attitude defiant even when neighbors drove by.

She would be a big girl, strong legs, wide,
lū‘au
feet. She would never be a beauty. From her father, she had inherited wide cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes that went from green to brown, like
hapu‘u
ferns. Her hair was black and curly and if not pulled back in a braid, made her look wild, electrified. She had the brown/gold skin and full, pouting lips of a local girl, so in that sense she did not stand out. But there was something in her eyes, always probing, asking why? that made her, even young, seem formidable. What folks remarked upon most were Ana’s shoulders. Wide like a boy’s, they gave the impression of double pride.

Some days when harsh, sobbing winds dried the membranes of throats, and left eyes gritty and raw, something would break loose inside her. Like a hunter of rain, she would run shouting up Keola Road, hair flying behind her like barbed moss. Boar-hounds—brawny warriors of the back roads—leapt alongside her like dark muscles exploding from the earth. And then the pounding of hooves, the gleaming, sweaty flanks of horses who shook their manes and galloped through meager grass beside her.

She would pass Inez Makiki’s house where the Hawaiian flag stood waving in the wind, which meant a newborn baby. The Makikis were full-bloods and flew the original Hawaiian flag, showing a
kāhili
in front of two crossed, pointed paddles, nine red, yellow, and green stripes for
the major islands, and one to represent the entire Hawaiian archipelago. Twins ran in that family and folks were waiting for the day Inez would fly two flags.

Ana always slowed down as she passed Uncle Pili’s house, an old bachelor who rented beds to field-workers and construction crews. “Dollah a day and suppah.” There were eight rooms, two beds to a room, his kitchen so small, the table, chairs, and Frigidaire were chained outside to trees. No phone, no TV, no indoor toilet. For twenty years Pili’s rates had stayed the same. Instead, each year he had lowered the wattage in the lightbulbs, leaving the house so dim, folks called his place The Lights-Out Inn.

“Beds fo’ sleeping,” Pili said. “Folks like read, go library.”

Now guests brought their own lightbulbs, and neighbors watched them flickering on as folks screwed them in, and flickering off as folks moved out. With all the in-out traffic, sometimes at dusk the house resembled a mother ship signaling her pods for the final voyage home. As she passed, Ana would wave to Uncle Pili sitting on his porch in a broken-down obstetrics chair retrieved from Angel’s Junkyard, his feet propped in the stirrups, his head thrown back, watching the day advance between his legs.

She would huff along, passing dozens of Quonset huts on either side of the road, left over from World War II, when the military occupied the land. Families lived in them now, and some were neat and hung with curtains, even miniature gardens. But some yards looked like dump sites—pyramids of rusted cars, skulls of hog heads, naked, running children, their bodies sequined with flies.

She would pass the chicken farm of the Chinese-Portuguese brothers, Panama and Florentine Chang, and then at the end of Keola Road, where it began to trickle out, Ana would slow down. Here were the turnoffs, degraded dirt roads that people stayed away from. Down these roads were rusted-out Quonsets long ago condemned, hideouts for the death gangs. Men who dealt serious drugs and kept arsenals of guns. They were seldom seen in daylight, but at night they rumbled, their trucks skidding up and down the road. Gunshots were heard. A body found floating facedown in a feeding trough, nudged back and forth by the snouts of pigs. When police raided the huts, they always found them empty. The gangs had melted farther back into the valley.

Sometimes after a long run, Ana would hose herself down, then come in and sit under a big, translucent light globe, watching a gecko
warm its belly against the genial glow. She would whisper to the small, transparent thing, observing its internal workings as it digested mosquitoes. She adopted a toad and three stray cats.

Ben shook his head. “This thing with animals, too much. She take that toad to bed with her, make conversation.”

“She’s lonely,” Pua said.

“Why, lonely? She got a house of folks who love her.”

“She doesn’t have a
mother
. Not the same.”

Each time Ana heard that word, a ship eased out of the corner of her eye and into the horizon. She would lie in the raw yellow light of a naked bulb, holding a textbook behind which she studied old snapshots of her mother.

“Maybe she never left the islands.”

“What you mean?” Rosie asked.

“Maybe she’s in Honolulu. Could be right now she’s with some handsome beachboy, sipping Mai Tais.”

Rosie gathered her in her arms. “Ana, when she’s ready, she’ll come home. She only got one home.”

“When she comes back, I’ll make her beg.”

N
EWSCASTERS ON THEIR BLACK-AND-WHITE
TV
DESCRIBED THE
long hot summer on the U. S. mainland, whole cities burning during “race riots.” Then riots escalated into assassinations. It happened to men named Martin and Bobby, names that did not mean much to her for they were far away.

But in that same year, 1968, Duke Kahanamoku died. Handsome, regal, pure-blood Hawaiian, he had been their living royalty, a fearless swimmer and record-breaking Olympic champ. When the sixty-five-year-old Queen Mother came from England touring the Pacific, Duke Kahanamoku was the man who charmed her so, she had got up and danced the hula. Now a wailing went up across the islands, people mourned for days.

Life suddenly seemed to escalate. Ana’s cousin, Lopaka, enlisted in the Army, and was on his way to Vietnam. Ten years Ana’s senior, he was a wild “park boy” who rumbled all night and came home at dawn when the frogs went to sleep. Sometimes he smelled of liquor and the musk of women. Yet he was fearless, hunting wild boar—wrestling them to the ground bare-handed—slaying them without a knife or gun. He swam
spearless through caves of sleeping tiger sharks, and one day he walked into a burning house and walked out with his hair singed off, carrying two children.

And Lopaka loved her. She was the one to whom he brought jars of fresh bamboo hearts. He taught her how to swing a machete. How to dive in the wildest surf, and how to eat a fish head. And when some girl broke his heart, Ana was the one he turned to, his damp, smoky sweat like eucalyptus fires, exciting the air around her. He took her net-fishing, and taught her how to pick
‘opihi
off the rocks. How to use
limu
as a poultice when she cut her foot. And days when she seemed irretrievably sad, he blew cigarette smoke into her ear, leaving her shivering with laughter.

Before he left for ’Nam, Lopaka drove her round the island to the wet side and took her up into the rain forests, the two of them trolling streams for
‘ōpae
, succulent, freshwater shrimp.

“Don’t go. We could run away, get married.” She was eight years old.

Lopaka laughed. “
Ei nei
, you’re just a kid. Besides, we’re blood. Anyway, I got to go. I’m bored to death.”

“I love you,” she said.

He scooped up
‘ōpae
, threw them in a can, and sat down next to her.

“I love you too. We’re both orphans in a way. Look, Ana, if I don’t come back …”

She began to cry.

“…  promise me you’ll be brave. That you’ll remember everything I taught you. Never go surfing alone. Do that thing with banana peels I showed you, so your hands don’t get so chapped. Stop eating so much
kimchee
, that’s why you don’t have friends. And when you make bamboo kites, what you do before splitting the wood?”

“I soak it first. But maybe I will kill myself. No one left for me, but Rosie.”

He laughed. “Silly girl! You got to learn to hit life back. Be
ikaika
. Strong. You want to love something for me while I’m gone?”

He spread his arms out, encompassing the forest, then he pointed out to sea. “Love this. All this. The
‘āina
, and the
kai
, and the
wai
. These things will always honor you.”

“I will,” she said. “I promise.”

He made her a thick lei of
‘ōpae
and settled it on her shoulders, the fat things wriggling and writhing in her hair. She wore it round her neck until the
‘ōpae
died, the smell so bad Ben had to cut it off her while she
slept. Ana stood brave when Lopaka left in uniform. But for weeks she walked bent like an old woman.

E
VEN WITH HIM GONE, THE HOUSE SEEMED LIKE A BREEDING SHED
, bulging with children, and sometimes she got lost in the shuffle. On fullmoon nights while people slept, she got up and counted bodies, adding up the younger kids, taking stock of the adults.

She took Rosie aside. “Now we’re getting older, they might soon need our beds. They’ll have to throw us out.” She heard thunder in the distance. “See? Even the gods are warning us.”

Rosie laughed. “You crazy? Families don’t do that. And that’s not god-thunder,
lōlō
. It’s the Army testing bombs up in Mākua.”

Aunties still laundered her clothes, braided her hair, and sent her off to school. They taught her manners, even instructed her on how to nibble cookies, always delicately in a straight line.

“Young ladies don’t leave teeth marks.”

They taught her how to Vaseline her fingers to get rid of stubborn dirt. “Young ladies don’t have red cuticles.”

Uncles still took her hunting and fishing, and “talked story” for hours. They taught her how to make “Wai‘anae wallets” by wrapping dollar bills round straws and sticking them in empty soda bottles so she would not be robbed. She walked down the highway past tough “park boys” pretending she was sipping a Nehi.

And when letters arrived from Lopaka, they called Ana to read them aloud because she was his
punahele
, his favorite. Sometimes her aunties wept, afraid he would be killed, and Ana took them in her arms, as if she were the elder. And no one threw her out.

… L
IGHT HAS ITS OWN EMOTION
. I
TS BLIND STITCH OF YIN AND
yang. Sometimes a woman in a distant city dreams of light, the way it struck a swinging gangway as it was slowly hoisted up. The sense of massive shifting as a ship, the
Lurline,
pulled away, in its wake, coin divers surfacing with quarters in their teeth, light striking the coins and shattering their faces. She dreams of dockside crowds calling out and waving
.