Paradise Park (11 page)

Night came, and I had to stop and put the book away because I couldn’t see. Still, for a while we sat in the warm darkness. You couldn’t help it, the way it melted around you—sweet and sticky like melted chocolate. Then all of a sudden we heard a noise. Footsteps. Breaking branches. Maybe the trespassers were coming back. Maybe even the police. Someone was moving out by our
pakalolo
patches. Kekui went and got the gun. He called, “Who’s there?”

There was no answer.

“Who’s there?” he called out again.

Then out of the trees came Kekui’s sister Roslind, and her husband, Michael.

Kekui threw down the gun. He said, “What you guys doing here?”

They’d flown in and then taken the bus as far as the line went, which
in those days was Kualapu’u. When the paved road ended, they’d hiked in, and we’d had rain, so they had to wade some muddy gullies where you never know when a flash flood might come up, just a wall of white water that can rise and carry anyone, crush you in an instant, or suck you all the way down to a roaring runoff stream and out to sea. But they’d made it out to Lani and Joseph’s place, and now to ours, and Roslind said, “Dad is dead.”

NO one could take it in at first, and especially not Lani and Kekui, since their dad was such a young guy, only fifty-four. It was true he was diabetic and he had a heart condition, but he’d had all that for years. No one ever thought about him dying. I put my arms around Kekui. I tried to comfort him, but he shrugged me off. He wouldn’t even look at me, let alone touch me.

Early the next morning we all washed ourselves in the stream. We brushed out our hair and we dressed in clean clothes, and the grownups put on sandals. And Joseph got our money, and we hiked all the way out to the road, which took half a day, and we got up to the dirt road, which was just a track cut from the velvety red earth, and we followed the road cleft out of the forest, so on either side you could see the banana plants and the tangled vines and the great trees sinking under the weight of all the greenery they carried. We each had a bag of some sort, and I had my backpack on my back, but since it was too much to carry, not my guitar, and we walked, this sad yet clean little procession, until we got to the paved asphalt. We took turns carrying the baby.

We rode the bus into town, and then we waited for the bus out to what you would call a one-horse, or maybe single-engine, airport. No one was too surprised there in the terminal when Joseph went to the ticket counter and peeled off our fares from this wad of twenty-dollar bills. I guess they could see we were country people, so that was how we had to travel.

T
HE
next morning we were standing at the funeral service at Makiki Gospel. We were all gathered at the cemetery, and Kekui and his sisters and his brothers were the coffin bearers. The minister spoke and spoke, and Mr. Eldridge’s children lifted that coffin and eased it down gently
into the freshly dug earth. It was baking hot, and there was hardly any breeze. I think it was the hottest fall day they’d had in years. But we stood there, it seemed like hours—all the relatives, and Mr. Eldridge’s descendants, eight children and fourteen grandchildren. In front of everyone, and not crying, probably just willing herself not to cry, stood Mrs. Eldridge—such a big woman, not fat, big like an opera singer, big like the photos of Princess Ruth when she sat at the Summer Palace on her throne.

At the end of the service, when everyone else just about collapsed weeping and embracing and falling onto one another, Mrs. Eldridge still stood strong, and she lifted up all the grown children caving in on her, and she looked each one in the eye, from the oldest, who was named Minnie, down to the youngest, who was Kekui, and when she looked at Kekui she said the first words I’d heard her speak all day. “KK, you’re coming home.”

“What?” he said.

“Roslind and Michael have the back room, Minnie and her kids are in front, Earl and Matthew have Minnie’s room, Leilan and Mitchell are upstairs,” she said.

Kekui just looked at her, just all hollowed out with grief and guilt.

“We cleaned out your room,” Mrs. Eldridge told him.

“Excuse me?” I ventured.

“Keep quiet, girl,” she said, but she kept her eyes fixed on her son.

In a funeral caravan we drove up to the Eldridges’ house in Aina Haina with its two plumeria trees in front. Mrs. Eldridge had six of her eight kids living in the house and, one way or another, a whole bunch of the grandchildren. There were add-ons in back of the house, and a second story above the garage. Mr. Eldridge had been a contractor. And there were something like seven cars in the driveway, plus a boat and a tour van. We sat down inside, everyone low from the funeral, not to mention bathed in sweat, and some of the babies were crying. Mrs. Eldridge took a couple of them on her knee. She looked around like she was ready to take everyone on her knee. But for what? To rock us? To hit us? “KK,” she said, “you’ve come back home to stay.”

“Excuse me?” I began again. I was trying to be polite.

“Quiet, girl. I have an application for you,” she told Kekui, and she
reached down in front of her over the babies to the coffee table, and picked up a bunch of white forms. “West Oahu College,” she said. “I brought up all my children to go to college. Okay?”

Kekui looked down totally crushed. His entire immediate family, which was at least forty people, was sitting there in his mom’s living room and out on the lanai. He couldn’t even look his mother in the eye.

“Everyone in this family is a worker,” Mrs. Eldridge said. “You filling this out?”

He didn’t say anything.

She just waited.

“Yeah,” he said to his own callused feet. “Goddammit, Kekui!” I burst out.

Then Mrs. Eldridge turned on me. “Get your mouth out of my house,” she declared, standing up in her full dimensions. “Hippie girl, just ’cause you washed up here on Oahu you don’t need to come invading my family. Go back to where you started—California, England, Holland, or whatever nationality you are. And don’t you dare walk around taking the Lord’s name in vain blaspheming my husband’s funeral. Get your
pakalolo
face away or Earl’ll take his badge out and arrest you!”

Civilization

I
never got my guitar back. I used to dream about it lying there in the field station in the trees on Molokai. I dreamed termites were marching on the guitar case, chewing the black cardboard away. I dreamed mynahs came and plucked tufts of the guitar case lining, which was fake fur the color of papaya, and the birds carried off all the fur for their nests. Rats sniffed to see if the guitar was dead. They scrabbled over the top and thrummed the rusty strings.

Kekui, however, was studying at West Oahu College and working nights as a fire-eater at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. He was busy being a father to his son—returning to his values he’d ditched two years before. I used to come sometimes to the Hilton to see him in his loincloth and grass anklets after his act, when he was packing up his jar of fire-retardant jelly and his three torches, which he used to juggle when they were aflame. At first when I came by we’d have conversations and arguments, and sometimes tears. But even then we both knew, although it took us a few months to admit it, that this wasn’t a short visit, or even a couple of years at home for college; Kekui was home for good. And I missed him; it made me sad, because he had been my best friend. I was just a little bit hurt to realize that in the eyes of his family I had been his
wild oats and his fling. Back there on Molokai I’d kind of assumed we’d been sowing our oats together, and flinging each other. But no. To his mother I’d just been a bad influence all along.

Kekui was that one hundredth sheep returning to the fold, the one that everyone loved even more than the other ninety-nine. He had his whole life there around him, his mother and all his relatives and his church. He actually started a children’s choir there. He loved children. He ended up having two more sons by his new girlfriend. But as for me, not being a sheep from a fold, I came back to Corinne’s sofa. And I had my backpack, and my, by this time, kind of minimalist clothes, and my puffed-out book of English literature, and Grandpa’s silver watch, which I have to admit, more than once I thought about selling.

After Corinne I stayed with Rich and his girlfriend, Kathryn, for a while. Then I came back to Corinne’s couch, and stayed so long, and lavished so much attention on the cat, that Rae accused me of driving a wedge between her and Jane, and Corinne said she threw up her hands. So I found a job at the concession stand at Sea Life Park, and moved back to the Y.

Every morning I took the bus down the short gray freeway past Kahala and past Wailupe, just rattling down Kalanianiole Highway, on the left all the little valleys full of tract houses like ticks on the furry flanks of the volcano, and on the right, the ocean shining. I just stayed on the bus till I got all the way to Sea Life Park right on the rocks by the shore, with its open-air paths running past outdoor tanks, its seal pens, its pretend lagoon, where twice a day a local damsel in an aloha print skirt and bikini top paddled in a canoe to a cement-and-lava-rock island covered with sea grapes and exactly three coconut palms, so she could throw fish prizes to the dolphins when they did their synchronized swimming and leaping. I worked in a little store with a roof thatched, Hawaiian style, with pili grass, and I sold film and candy and killer-whale key chains, and various plastic windup toys and clear plastic snow globes, except these were tropical so they had glitter that swirled around miniature palm trees.

I got to know some of the guys who took care of the dolphins, and some of the vets who watched over the sick and injured animals that came through—dolphins with big bites taken out of their dorsals, and little orphan seals, and a baby humpback whale, who was resting in a
holding tank before getting towed out to sea. And I loved those animals, especially the dolphins—just the way they rolled slightly on one side to look at you, and the way they chirped when you spoke to them, and clucked and laughed. The dolphin guys, Jason and Neil, would let me throw herring to the dolphins sometimes. They’d let me stand on the platform that extended over the dolphins’ tank, and I’d toss out fish, and sometimes beach balls that the dolphins would bat back to me.

There was one older dolphin named Leilani, one of the stars of the park, who used to get off work the same time I did, meaning she finished her afternoon show when I went off shift at the store. I used to sit down on the platform by her private exercise tank, and tell her all my troubles—for example, how I missed Kekui, and the quiet back on Molokai, and Leilani would really listen. She would glide right up and cock her head and look at me with her wise black eye. I’d ask her questions, like “How do you think I can ever get back to living in a more natural place?” and she’d swim very deliberately around the tank, like she was thinking it over, and then she’d come back to me and roll so she could look at me with her other eye, so penetrating, but yet so sympathetic. I really considered her my mentor, and I told her everything, even things I’d never dream of telling anyone else. She always listened to me. She always had time—and, of course, since she was far more intelligent than any human, she always understood. Actually we had a lot in common, because we were both so isolated. Leilani was an Atlantic dolphin, and she’d been imported five years before for some comparative scientific experiments on echolocation. So she came from back east like me.

“The thing is,” I told her, late one afternoon, “the happiest I’ve ever been was out where it’s still wild. Where people haven’t spoiled the land yet.”

Leilani bobbed up in the water and sat back, head and neck out of the water, which was one of her signature tricks. That was when, in the shows, Neil or Jason would toss a lei around her neck.

“Civilization,” I said, “is such a scam. It’s all about affiliations, and school. And pleasing other people.”

Leilani bobbed up and down, yes.

“Living your life for your mother, for Godssakes! You think you know someone,” I said, “and then he goes home, and he’s completely
different. It’s almost like the person he was when he was with you didn’t exist at all!”

She clicked.

I trailed my hand in the briny water of her tank. “Do you ever wish you were a wild dolphin again?” I asked.

Then she dove down into the tank and swam around deep. I was crestfallen. How could I have asked such a tactless question? I should have known it would offend her.

Leilani put up with a lot from me. I used to come read my poetry to her in the tank, and she used to glide up right near me and listen with her invisible ears. And I used to sing her songs I had composed back when I had my guitar. But now I sang a capella. One of my best songs was titled “Hey!”